by Muriel Spark
‘Joan was there at the time. Joan heard the screams. We had to give her a sedative to calm —’
‘— calm her down.’
‘But who made the mistake?’
‘She usually makes up the eye-drops herself. She’s got a dispenser’s —’
‘— dispenser’s certificate, you know.
‘Her name was on the bottle, Joan says.
‘Who wrote the name on the bottle? That’s the question. They’ll find out from the handwriting. If it was Mr Simmonds he’ll be disqualified.’
‘She always wrote the names on the bottles. She’ll be put off the dispensers’ roll, poor thing.’
‘They’ll lose their licence.’
‘I got eye-drops from them myself only three weeks ago. If I’d have known what I know now, I’d never have —’
‘The doctor says they can’t find the bottle, it’s got lost.’
‘No, the sergeant says definitely they’ve got the bottle. The handwriting is hers. She must have made up the drops herself, poor thing.’
‘Deadly nightshade, same thing.’
‘Stuff called atropine. Belladonna. Deadly nightshade.’
‘It should have been stuff called eserine. That’s what she usually had, the doctor says.
‘Dr Gray says?’
‘Yes, Dr Gray.’
‘Dr Gray says if you switch from eserine to atropine —’
It was put down to an accident. There was a strong hope that Miss Simmonds’s one eye would survive. It was she who had made up the prescription. She refused to discuss it.
I said, ‘The bottle may have been tampered with, have you thought of that?’
‘Joan’s been reading books.’
The last week of my holidays old Mrs Simmonds died above the shop and left all her fortune to her daughter. At the same time I got tonsillitis and could not return to school.
I was attended by our woman doctor, the widow of the town’s former doctor who had quite recently died. This was the first time I had seen Dr Gray, although I had known the other Dr Gray, her husband, whom I missed. The new Dr Gray was a sharp-faced athletic woman. She was said to be young. She came to visit me every day for a week. After consideration I decided she was normal and in the right, though dull.
Through the feverish part of my illness I saw Basil at the desk through the window and I heard Dorothy scream. While I was convalescent I went for walks, and always returned by the lane beside the Simmonds’ house. There had been no bickering over the mother’s will. Everyone said the eye-drop affair was a terrible accident. Miss Simmonds had retired and was said to be going rather dotty.
I saw Dr Gray leaving the Simmonds at six o’clock one evening. She must have been calling on poor Miss Simmonds. She noticed me at once as I emerged from the lane.
‘Don’t loiter about, Joan. It’s getting chilly.’
The next evening I saw a light in the office window. I stood under the tree and looked. Dr Gray sat upon the desk with her back to me, quite close. Mr Simmonds sat in his chair talking to her, tilting back his chair. A bottle of sherry stood on the table. They each had a glass half-filled with sherry. Dr Gray swung her legs, she was in the wrong, sexy, like our morning help who sat on the kitchen table swinging her legs.
But then she spoke. ‘It will take time,’ she said. ‘A very difficult patient, of course.
Basil nodded. Dr Gray swung her legs, and looked professional. She was in the right, she looked like our games mistress who sometimes sat on a desk swinging her legs.
Before I returned to school I saw Basil one morning at his shop door. ‘Reading glasses all right now?’ he said.
‘Oh yes, thank you.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your sight. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.
I walked on, certain that he had known my guilty suspicions all along.
‘I took up psychology during the war. Up till then I was in general practice.’
I had come to the summer school to lecture on history and she on psychology. Psychiatrists are very often ready to talk to strangers about their inmost lives. This is probably because they spend so much time hearing out their patients. I did not recognize Dr Gray, except as a type, when I had attended her first lecture on ‘the psychic manifestations of sex . She spoke of child-poltergeists, and I was bored, and took refuge in observing the curious language of her profession. I noticed the word ‘arousement’ . ‘Adolescents in a state of sexual arousement,’ she said, may become possessed of almost psychic insight.’
After lunch, since the Eng. Lit. people had gone off to play tennis, she tacked on to me and we walked to the lake across the lawns, past the rhododendrons. This lake had once been the scene of a love-mad duchess’s death.
‘… during the war. Before that I was in general practice. It’s strange, she said, ‘how I came to take up psychology. My second husband had a breakdown and was under a psychiatrist. Of course, he’s incurable, but I decided … It’s strange, but that’s how I came to take it up. It saved my reason. My husband is still in a home. His sister, of course, became quite incurable. He has his lucid moments. I did not realize it, of course, when I married, but there was what I’d now call an oedipus-transference on his part, and…’
How tedious I found these phrases! We had come to the lake. I stooped over it and myself looked back at myself through the dark water. I looked at Dr Gray’s reflection and recognized her. I put on my dark glasses, then.
‘Am I boring you?’ she said.
‘No, carry on.
‘Must you wear those glasses? … it is a modern psychological phenomenon … the trend towards impersonalization … the modern Inquisitor.’
For a while, she watched her own footsteps as we walked round the lake. Then she continued her story.’… an optician. His sister was blind — going blind when I first attended her. Only the one eye was affected. Then there was an accident, one of those psychological accidents. She was a trained dispenser, but she mixed herself the wrong eye-drops. Now it’s very difficult to make a mistake like that, normally. But subconsciously she wanted to, she wanted to. But she wasn’t normal, she was not normal.’
‘I’m not saying she was,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’
‘I’m sure she wasn’t a normal person,’ I said, ‘if you say so.
‘It can all be explained psychologically, as we’ve tried to show to my husband. We’ve told him and told him, and given him every sort of treatment — shock, insulin, everything. And after all, the stuff didn’t have any effect on his sister immediately, and when she did go blind it was caused by acute glaucoma. She would probably have lost her sight in any case. Well, she went off her head completely and accused her brother of having put the wrong drug in the bottle deliberately. This is the interesting part from the psychological point of view — she said she had seen something that he didn’t want her to see, something disreputable. She said he wanted to blind the eye that saw it. She said …’
We were walking round the lake for the second time. When we came to the spot where I had seen her face reflected I stopped and looked over the water.
‘I’m boring you.’
‘No, no.’
‘I wish you would take off those glasses.’
I took them off for a moment. I rather liked her for her innocence in not recognizing me, though she looked hard and said, ‘There’s a subconscious reason why you wear them.’
‘Dark glasses hide dark thoughts,’ I said.
‘Is that a saying?’
‘Not that I’ve heard. But it is one now.
She looked at me anew. But she didn’t recognize me. These fishers of the mind have no eye for outward things. Instead, she was ‘recognizing’ my mind: I daresay I came under some category of hers.
I had my glasses on again, and was walking on.
‘How did your husband react to his sister’s accusations?’ I said.
‘He was remarkably kind.’
‘Kind?’
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br /> ‘Oh, yes, in the circumstances. Because she started up a lot of gossip in the neighbourhood. It was only a small town. It was a long time before I could persuade him to send her to a home for the blind where she could be looked after. There was a terrible bond between them. Unconscious incest.’
‘Didn’t you know that when you married him? I should have thought it would have been obvious.’
She looked at me again. ‘I had not studied psychology at that time,’ she said.
I thought, neither had I.
We were silent for the third turn about the lake. Then she said, ‘Well, I was telling you how I came to study psychology and practise it. My husband had this breakdown after his sister went away. He had delusions. He kept imagining he saw eyes looking at him everywhere. He still sees them from time to time. But eyes, you see. That’s significant. Unconsciously he felt he had blinded his sister. Because unconsciously he wanted to do so. He keeps confessing that he did so.’
‘And attempted to forge the will?’ I said. She stopped. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Does he admit that he tried to forge his mother’s will?’
‘I haven’t mentioned anything about a will.’
‘Oh, I thought you had.’
‘But, in fact, that was his sister’s accusation. What made you say that? How did you know?’
‘I must be psychic,’ I said.
She took my arm. I had become a most endearing case history.
‘You must be psychic indeed,’ she said. ‘You must tell me more about yourself. Well, that’s the story of my taking up my present profession. When my husband started having these delusions and making these confessions I felt I had to understand the workings of the mind. And I began to study them. It has been fruitful. It has saved my own reason.
‘Did it ever occur to you that the sister’s story might be true?’ I said. ‘Especially as he admits it.’
She took away her arm and said, ‘Yes, I considered the possibility. I must admit I considered it well.’
She saw me watching her face. She looked as if she were pleading some personal excuse.
‘Oh do,’ she said, ‘please take off those glasses.
‘Why don’t you believe his own confession?’
‘I’m a psychiatrist and we seldom believe confessions.’ She looked at her watch as if to suggest I had started the whole conversation and was boring her.
I said, ‘He might have stopped seeing eyes if you’d taken him at his word.’
She shouted, ‘What are you saying? What are you thinking of? He wanted to give a statement to the police, do you realize …’
‘You know he’s guilty,’ I said.
‘As his wife,’ she said, ‘I know he’s guilty. But as a psychiatrist I must regard him as innocent. That’s why I took up the subject.’ She suddenly turned angry and shouted, ‘You damned inquisitor, I’ve met your type before.’
I could hardly believe she was shouting, who previously had been so calm. ‘Oh, it’s not my business,’ I said, and took off my glasses to show willing.
I think it was then she recognized me.
The Ormolu Clock
The Hotel Stroh stood side by side with the Guesthouse Lublonitsch, separated by a narrow path that led up the mountain, on the Austrian side, to the Yugoslavian border. Perhaps the old place had once been a great hunting tavern. These days, though, the Hotel Stroh was plainly a disappointment to its few drooping tenants. They huddled together like birds in a storm; their flesh sagged over the unscrubbed tables on the dark back veranda, which looked over Herr Stroh’s untended fields. Usually, Herr Stroh sat somewhat apart, in a mist of cognac, his lower chin resting on his red neck, and his shirt open for air. Those visitors who had come not for the climbing but simply for the view sat and admired the mountain and were sloppily waited upon until the weekly bus should come and carry them away. If they had cars, they rarely stayed long — they departed, as a rule, within two hours of arrival, like a comic act. This much was entertainingly visible from the other side of the path, at the Guesthouse Lublonitsch.
I was waiting for friends to come and pick me up on their way to Venice. Frau Lublonitsch welcomed all her guests in person. When I arrived I was hardly aware of the honour, she seemed so merely a local woman — undefined and dumpy — as she emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands on her brown apron, with her grey hair drawn back tight, her sleeves rolled up, her dingy dress, black stockings, and boots. It was only gradually that her importance was permitted to dawn upon strangers.
There was a Herr Lublonitsch, but he was of no account, even though he got all the marital courtesies. He sat punily with his drinking friends at one of the tables in front of the inn, greeting the guests as they passed in and out and receiving as much attention as he wanted from the waitresses. When he was sick Frau Lublonitsch took his meals with her own hands to a room upstairs set aside for his sickness. But she was undoubtedly the boss.
She worked the hired girls fourteen hours a day, and they did the work cheerfully. She was never heard to complain or to give an order; it was enough that she was there. Once, when a girl dropped a tray with five mugs of soup, Frau Lublonitsch went and fetched a cloth and submissively mopped up the mess herself, like any old peasant who had suffered worse than that in her time. The maids called her Frau Chef. ‘Frau Chef prepares special food when her husband’s stomach is bad,’ one of them told me.
Appended to the guesthouse was a butcher’s shop, and this was also a Lublonitsch possession. A grocer’s shop had been placed beside it, and on an adjacent plot of ground — all Lublonitsch property — a draper’s shop was nearing completion. Two of her sons worked in the butcher’s establishment; a third had been placed in charge of the grocer’s; and the youngest son, now ready to take his place, was destined for the draper’s.
In the garden, strangely standing on a path between the flowers for decorating the guests’ tables and the vegetables for eating, facing the prolific orchard and overhung by the chestnut trees that provided a roof for outdoor diners, grew one useless thing — a small, well-tended palm tree. It gave an air to the place. Small as it was, this alien plant stood as high as the distant mountain peaks when seen from the perspective of the great back porch where we dined. It quietly dominated the view.
Ordinarily, I got up at seven, but one morning I woke at half-past five and came down from my room on the second floor to the yard, to find someone to make me some coffee. Standing in the sunlight, with her back to me, was Frau Lublonitsch. She was regarding her wide kitchen garden, her fields beyond it, her outbuildings and her pigsties where two aged women were already at work. One of the sons emerged from an outbuilding carrying several strings of long sausages. Another led a bullock with a bag tied over its head to a tree and chained it there to await the slaughterers. Frau Lublonitsch did not move but continued to survey her property, her pigs, her pig-women, her chestnut trees, her beanstalks, her sausages, her sons, her tall gladioli, and — as if she had eyes in the back of her head — she seemed aware, too, of the good thriving guesthouse behind her, and the butcher’s shop, the draper’s shop, and the grocer’s.
Just as she turned to attack the day’s work, I saw that she glanced at the sorry Hotel Stroh across the path. I saw her mouth turn down at the corners with the amusement of one who has a certain foreknowledge; I saw a landowner’s recognition in her little black eyes.
You could tell, even before the local people told you, that Frau Lublonitsch had built up the whole thing from nothing by her own wits and industry. But she worked pitiably hard. She did all the cooking. She supervised the household, and, without moving hurriedly, she sped into the running of the establishment like the maniac drivers from Vienna who tore along the highroad in front of her place. She scoured the huge pans herself; wielding her podgy arm round and round; clearly, she trusted none of the girls to do the job properly. She was not above sweeping the floor, feeding the pigs, and serving in the butcher’s shop, where she would patiently ho
ld one after another great sausage under her customer’s nose for him to smell its quality. She did not sit down, except to take her dinner in the kitchen, from her rising at dawn to her retiring at one in the morning.
Why does she do it, what for? Her sons are grown up, she’s got her guesthouse, her servants, her shops, her pigs, fields, cattle —At the café across the river, where I went in the late afternoon, they said, ‘Frau Lublonitsch has got far more than that. She owns all the strip of land up to the mountain. She’s got three farms. She may even expand across the river and down this way to the town.’
‘Why does she work so hard? She dresses like a peasant,’ they said. ‘She scours the pots.’ Frau Lublonitsch was their favourite subject.
She did not go to church, she was above church. I had hoped to see her there, wearing different clothes and perhaps sitting with the chemist, the dentist, and their wives in the second front row behind the count and his family; or perhaps she might have taken some less noticeable place among the congregation. But Frau Lublonitsch was a church unto herself; and even resembled in shape the onion-shaped spires of the churches around her.
I climbed the lower slopes of the mountains while the experts in their boots did the thing earnestly up on the sheer crags above the clouds. When it rained, they came back and reported, ‘Tito is sending the bad weather.’ The maids were bored with the joke, but they obliged with smiles every time, and served them up along with the interminable veal.
The higher mountain reaches were beyond me except by bus. I was anxious, however, to scale the peaks of Frau Lublonitsch’s nature.
One morning, when everything was glittering madly after a nervous stormy night, I came down early to look for coffee. I had heard voices in the yard some moments before, but by the time I appeared they had gone indoors. I followed the voices to the dark stone kitchen and peered in the doorway. Beyond the chattering girls, I caught sight of a further doorway, which usually remained closed. Now it was open.
Within it was a bedroom reaching far back into the house. It was imperially magnificent. It was done in red and gold. I saw a canopied bed, built high, splendidly covered with a scarlet quilt. The pillows were piled up at the head — about four of them, very white. The bedhead was deep dark wood, touched with gilt. A golden fringe hung from the canopy. In some ways this bed reminded me of the glowing bed by which van Eyck ennobled the portrait of Jan Arnolfini and his wife. All the rest of the Lublonitsch establishment was scrubbed and polished local wood, but this was a poetic bed.
