The Complete Short Stories

by Muriel Spark

  ‘Was it Oxford St John?’ said Raymond.

  ‘Raymond, the doctor told you not to come here upsetting me. I’m feeling terrible.’

  ‘Was it Oxford St John?’

  ‘Clear out of here, you swine, saying things like that.’

  He demanded to be taken to see the baby, as he had done every day for a week. The nurses were gathered round it, neglecting the squalling whites in the other cots for the sight of their darling black. She was indeed quite black, with a woolly crop and tiny negroid nostrils. She had been baptised that morning, though not in her parents’ presence. One of the nurses had stood as godmother.

  The nurses dispersed in a flurry as Raymond approached. He looked hard at the baby. It looked back with its black button eyes. He saw the name-tab round its neck, ‘Dawn Mary Parker.’

  He got hold of a nurse in the corridor. ‘Look here, you just take that name Parker off that child’s neck. The name’s not Parker, it isn’t my child.’

  The nurse said, ‘Get away, we’re busy.’

  ‘There’s just a chance,’ said the doctor to Raymond, ‘that if there’s ever been black blood in your family or your wife’s, it’s coming out now. It’s a very long chance. I’ve never known it happen in my experience, but I’ve heard of cases, I could read them up.’

  ‘There’s nothing like that in my family,’ said Raymond. He thought of Lou, the obscure Liverpool antecedents. The parents had died before he had met Lou.

  ‘It could be several generations back,’ said the doctor.

  Raymond went home, avoiding the neighbours who would stop him to inquire after Lou. He rather regretted smashing up the cot in his first fury. That was something low coming out in him. But again, when he thought of the tiny black hands of the baby with their pink fingernails he did not regret smashing the cot.

  He was successful in tracing the whereabouts of Oxford St John. Even before he heard the result of Oxford’s blood test he said to Lou, ‘Write and ask your relations if there’s been any black blood in the family.’

  ‘Write and ask yours,’ she said.

  She refused to look at the black baby. The nurses fussed round it all day, and came to report its progress to Lou.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Mrs Parker, she’s a lovely child.’

  ‘You must care for your infant,’ said the priest.

  ‘You don’t know what I’m suffering,’ Lou said.

  ‘In the name of God,’ said the priest, ‘if you’re a Catholic Christian you’ve got to expect to suffer.’

  ‘I can’t go against my nature,’ said Lou. ‘I can’t be expected to —Raymond said to her one day in the following week, ‘The blood tests are all right, the doctor says.

  ‘What do you mean, all right?’

  ‘Oxford’s blood and the baby’s don’t tally, and —’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ she said. ‘The baby’s black and your blood tests can’t make it white.’

  ‘No,’ he said. He had fallen out with his mother, through his inquiries whether there had been coloured blood in his family. ‘The doctor says, he said, ‘that these black mixtures sometimes occur in seaport towns. It might have been generations back.’

  ‘One thing,’ said Lou. ‘I’m not going to take that child back to the flat.’

  ‘You’ll have to,’ he said.

  Elizabeth wrote her a letter which Raymond intercepted:

  ‘Dear Lou Raymond is asking if we have any blacks in the family well thats funny you have a coloured God is not asleep. There was that Flinn cousin Tommy at Liverpool he was very dark they put it down to the past a nigro off a ship that would be before our late Mothers Time God rest her soul she would turn in her grave you shoud have kept up your bit to me whats a pound a Week to you. It was on our fathers side the colour and Mary Flinn you remember at the dairy was dark remember her hare was like nigro hare it must be back in the olden days the nigro some ansester but it is only nature. I thank the almighty it has missed my kids and your hubby must think it was that nigro you was showing off when you came to my place. I wish you all the best as a widow with kids you shoud send my money as per usual your affec sister Elizabeth.’

  ‘I gather from Elizabeth,’ said Raymond to Lou, ‘that there was some element of colour in your family. Of course, you couldn’t be expected to know about it. I do think, though, that some kind of record should be kept.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Lou. ‘The baby’s black and nothing can make it white.’

  Two days before Lou left the hospital she had a visitor, although she had given instructions that no one except Raymond should be let in to see her. This lapse she attributed to the nasty curiosity of the nurses, for it was Henry Pierce come to say goodbye before embarkation. He stayed less than five minutes.

  ‘Why, Mrs Parker, your visitor didn’t stay long,’ said the nurse.

  ‘No, I soon got rid of him. I thought I made it clear to you that I didn’t want to see anyone. You shouldn’t have let him in.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Mrs Parker, but the young gentleman looked so upset when we told him so. He said he was going abroad and it was his last chance, he might never see you again. He said, “How’s the baby?”, and we said, “Tip-top.”‘

  ‘I know what’s in your mind,’ said Lou. ‘But it isn’t true. I’ve got the blood tests.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Parker, I wouldn’t suggest for a minute …’

  ‘She must have went with one of they niggers that used to come.’

  Lou could never be sure if that was what she heard from the doorways and landings as she climbed the stairs of Cripps House, the neighbours hushing their conversation as she approached.

  ‘I can’t take to the child. Try as I do, I simply can’t even like it.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Raymond. ‘Mind you, if it was anyone else’s child I would think it was all right. It’s just the thought of it being mine, and people thinking it isn’t.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ she said.

  One of Raymond’s colleagues had asked him that day how his friends Oxford and Henry were getting on. Raymond had to look twice before he decided that the question was innocent. But one never knew … Already Lou and Raymond had approached the adoption society. It was now only a matter of waiting for word.

  ‘If that child was mine,’ said Tina Farrell, ‘I’d never part with her. I wish we could afford to adopt another. She’s the loveliest little darkie in the world.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think so,’ said Lou, ‘if she really was yours. Imagine it for yourself, waking up to find you’ve had a black baby that everyone thinks has a nigger for its father.’

  ‘It would be a shock,’ Tina said, and tittered.

  ‘We’ve got the blood tests,’ said Lou quickly.

  Raymond got a transfer to London. They got word about the adoption very soon.

  ‘We’ve done the right thing,’ said Lou. ‘Even the priest had to agree with that, considering how strongly we felt against keeping the child.’

  ‘Oh, he said it was a good thing?’

  ‘No, not a good thing. In fact he said it would have been a good thing if we could have kept the baby. But failing that, we did the right thing. Apparently, there’s a difference.

  The Thing about Police Stations

  In the first place the boy did not wish to go to the police station to inquire for his aunt’s little spotted dog. He was sorry she had lost the dog, but he didn’t like police stations.

  ‘I’ve got a thing about police stations,’ he explained.

  ‘Your generation has things about everything,’ she said, ‘and the only way to conquer your thing about police stations is to go into one.’

  He felt sure this was a fallacy. He was eighteen. He had already met a girl who had failed to get over her thing about post offices. But his aunt was upset about the dog, and so he went.

  It was a dark afternoon in the dead of January. He took a long long time to come to the end of the icy zig-zag lanes which led across the countryside to the poli
ce station. The lanes crossed land which had been quarried and abandoned about twenty years ago. Nature had never quite reclaimed itself here. In summer, it was true, when they were covered with tall tough grass and off-white patches of ladies’ lace, those gaping pits had an appearance of normality. But in winter they were black thorny wounds in the earth. He feared them greatly and secretly, and always walked stealthily there, so that he would not be noticed by these terrible quarries.

  His aunt always made light of that walk along the quarry lanes: ‘Only a five minutes’ walk.’

  He didn’t know what she meant by five minutes. Anyhow, the sky was dark by the time he reached the police station, the afternoon was gone.

  He entered, and saw two uniformed men sitting behind a high counter. One of them was writing in a book. For a long long time neither of them took any notice of his presence, and he wondered if he ought to cough, or say something. Should he say, ‘Excuse me, it’s about a little white dog with black spots?’ Or should he say, ‘May I speak to the officer in charge?’ He remembered that when he was a schoolboy one of his teachers used often to say, ‘Discretion is the better part of valour.’ He kept his peace and waited.

  The policeman who was not writing in the book was resting his elbows on the counter, he was resting his chin in his hands and his eyes on mystical space. He was big-featured and broody, like a displaced Viking.

  Behind the men was a door, the top half of which was frosted glass. Someone was behind it. The young man could see the shadow moving.

  At length, a loud voice came from behind this door, ‘No. 292 this way! No. 292 this way!’

  Immediately the Viking straightened up. The other policeman threw down his pen. They lifted the end-flap of the counter and together approached the boy.

  ‘No. 292 this way,’ said the Viking to the youth. ‘No. 292 this way, the other repeated.

  He was surprised. Clearly they expected him to follow them and he was about to open his mouth to protest when the adage ‘Discretion is the better part of valour’ seized his brain together with ‘Speech is silver but silence is golden.’ So he said nothing. But as he was offended by the tone of their address, he did not move. The Viking took him by the wrist and pulled him into the inner room, the other policeman following.

  There were now three policemen. They sat on plain hard chairs on three sides of a table, while the young man stood on the fourth side, being watched by them.

  After a long long time the third policeman, the one who had first called ‘No. 292 this way,’ made a note on some papers. Then he looked up and addressed the youth in his loud voice:

  ‘There has been an unspeakable crime. Guilty or Not Guilty?’

  He remembered ‘Nothing venture, nothing win’ and spoke up.

  ‘What crime?’ he said.

  ‘Use your logic, please,’ the policeman said. ‘We cannot speak about a crime which is unspeakable. Guilty or Not Guilty?’

  ‘I demand a proper trial,’ said the boy. This was foolish, for what he should have said was, ‘I think there has been some misunderstanding’ . But he did not think of this in the stress of the moment, and in fact he felt a little proud of himself for thinking to demand a proper trial.

  The Viking jumped to his feet immediately. ‘No. 292 for trial!’ he shouted. A door at the far end of the room opened and three more policemen entered. They put handcuffs on the prisoner and led him away along a lot of corridors. After walking for at least half an hour they came to a cell. The boy was locked in.

  All that night he thought to himself that his aunt would surely come in the morning and clear up the misunderstanding. He fancied she must already have applied for him at the police station, but evidently had found it closed.

  In the morning a policeman unlocked his cell.

  ‘Crust and water for 292, he said, thrusting a crust of bread and a mug of water into the prisoner’s hands. The policeman disappeared before the boy could speak to him.

  Some hours later the head policeman arrived, carrying some papers. He was very suave in his manner. Quickly, before he could speak, the young man put in, ‘I wish to see my aunt. Has she been inquiring for me?’

  He bowed. ‘There was a lady,’ he said, ‘about a spotted dog.’

  ‘That’s my aunt. Did she inquire for me?’

  The chief of police bowed. ‘I believe so. But we explained that you preferred to stand your trial.’

  ‘There’s been a misunderstanding.

  ‘It will be cleared up at the trial. I have come to tell you that the trial will take place in three months’ rime. We detain you till then.’

  ‘That’s irregular,’ the youth said smartly. ‘There’s a Habeas Corpus Act —’

  The policeman bowed. ‘It is obsolete,’ he said.

  And so, for three months the young man of eighteen watched the sky above the roof behind the high window, dreadfully barred. The walls of his cell were pinky-grey, and there were hundreds of rats. The aunt said later, when he told her of the rats, that this couldn’t be. The police are nothing if not hygienic in their habitat,’ she said. Maybe so, but still there were hundreds of rats.

  Needless to say the boy was found guilty at the trial. His aunt, who had in the meantime found her little dog, gave evidence to the effect that he was incapable of an unspeakable crime, being incapable of almost everything. But the Prosecution pointed out that a) her evidence was suspect as she was a blood relation and b) it was impossible to admit evidence in connection with a crime too unspeakable to speak about. The judge had a square face with double-lens glasses. All the jury were policemen with double lenses. The youth wondered afterwards if he should have shouted out in Court, ‘I am innocent of the unspeakable crime,’ but perhaps they wouldn’t have believed him.

  He was sent away to the salt mines of somewhere for three months. Since his return the aunt kept on saying, ‘It could all have been avoided if you had only handled the situation with aplomb.’ Anyway, that is what happened, and her nephew still has a thing about police stations.

  A Hundred and Eleven Years Without a Chauffeur

  Grandmothers, great-grandfathers and all antecedents. Don’t forget they lived ordinary lives, had pains, went to work, talked, busied themselves, had sex — full days and full nights as long as all that lasted. I see no reason to drool over them. They did not drool over us. They thought, if they wanted and could, of the future, the generations to come, but only in the most general terms, obviously, in the nature of things.

  When they wrote memoirs and letters, we know that is not the whole story. When they left only their photographs and a few imputed sayings and habits, still less have we got the whole story. We have their birth and marriage records and their tombstones in some country churchyard, as in the case of my forebears.

  When it came to producing photographs for my biographer, Joe, there was little to go on. I hadn’t looked them over for at least twenty years. They had been tucked into a drawer in a spare bedroom together with a tiny musical box that still played a tinkly tune when wound up, a few old reels of black cotton, a tin box of Venus pencils (unused, a very useful find). There was also a piece of stone from an excavation of antiquity, but which? Other items.

  I took out the photographs and spread them out on a table. Is that all? I could have sworn there had been more. In fact, I knew there had been more. Where were they all? Who on earth could have gone off with my old fusty photos, what use would anyone have had for them?

  I looked at the photographs one by one, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. People, even one’s friends, do go off with things. But their main objects of acquisition are books. Guests go off with books out of the guestroom, but not photos, not old photos of dull people of modest means.

  Gladys was there, an aunt on my maternal side married to my mother’s brother Jim. Jim was sitting with a hand on his knee, a watch-chain across his belly, while Gladys stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder. Beside Gladys was a photographer’s prop in the form of a pillar sur
mounted by a bunch of flowers. Date, circa 1880.

  Next, Mary-Ann, Nancy, Maud and my great grandmother Sarah Rowbottom, who lived to 105, and here shows that possibility already at sixty-five. They are wearing their best frocks, tight corseted waists, prominent busts, as breasts were called, lots of rows of lace and always a locket hanging round their neck with God knows whose photos, whose locks of hair, enclosed in those small breast-warmed cases. Mary-Ann, who was the first to get married, wore a dark brooch. Their hair was done up, all in order. Lower middle class of those days, aspiring. They were corn dealers and managed quite well.

  They lie in Vicarage Road churchyard, Watford, every one, they are marked by two stones: Deeply Mourned.

  I explained them one by one to Joe, and added what I knew of family lore.

  Next came my mother, born 111 years back, dead these twenty-seven years. And a cousin whose name I can’t recall but who, I know, was very ambitious. Alas, she never achieved her ambition, which was to own a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur to drive her from shop to shop, as was possible in those days. This cousin — what was her name? — oh, well, she became a Mrs Henderson, wife of an accountant, and got as far as Paris on the Golden Arrow one year. No Rolls, no chauffeur. But Mrs Henderson always said that she wanted one.

  Now where was that other photo of Mrs Henderson, one that I remembered well because it was so uncharacteristically informal, where she was standing over her sewing machine? She was slightly bent, in profile, slim-waisted and handsome. Someone with a camera had caught her examining the bobbin of her machine, her beloved treadle-operated Singer. Something was wrong with the machine and Mrs Henderson —what was her name? — was looking intently at it. An enchanting photograph. It was gone. Someone had removed it.

  The same with a few others I now remembered. My paternal grandmother from a Jewish family in Lithuania, very blonde and Polish looking, her hair piled and plaited, not at all Jewish to look at, unlike my grandfather with his lovely smile inside his beard; he was so like my father, who, however, was always clean shaven. My grandmother Henrietta’s beautiful photograph was missing. I remembered her so well in the photograph, never having known her in the flesh. I remember the large space between the eyes which I have inherited. Blue eyes. Where has she gone?