The Hothouse by the East River

by Muriel Spark

  ‘I need a room to myself,’ Elsa says. ‘I won’t share.’

  ‘There’s a war on,’ one of these draped billet-administrators reminds her in a voice which cracks like a scratchy gramophone needle on an old record.

  ‘But,’ says Elsa, ‘it wouldn’t be possible for me to share with another girl. It wouldn’t be comfortable for the other girl. I see things.’

  ‘What?’ says the one. ‘You what?’ says the other. Elsa swings her bare brown legs in the chair. Her clothing coupons do not run to stockings for everyday occasions.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she says, ‘I am really a bit uncanny. I have supernatural communications.’ There is a large round government clock stuck up on the wall, its size hideously magnifying the importance of working hours and seconds. Underneath it, a poster, unaccountably weather-beaten, bears the motto, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.

  The billet-administrators, who have been up to now, to all appearances identical, invisibly separate themselves, hearing Elsa’s explanation, into senior official and less senior. The senior draws Elsa’s file towards her, puts on her reading spectacles, and begins to read the details set forth on the first folio, while her lesser-paid colleague cranes forth her head over her desk and says probingly to Elsa, as if interviewing her for her qualifications in the field of aberrant sex, ‘Do you use an instrument?’

  ‘No, it isn’t necessary,’ says Elsa, ‘for spiritual communication.’ She is looking at the large clock-face and noting that she is late for her appointment with Paul. This is their second leave together in London. She says, ‘I can’t wait too long. I must go, I’m afraid. I’m on leave, actually, you know.’

  Nobody is put to share her room. Elsa is rather disliked on this account, her only friend being Poppy Xavier who has the best room in the house to herself as a matter of course.

  ‘Peter Pan,’ says Paul Hazlett to his son. ‘Is that what you called me over here to discuss?’

  ‘You were not called over by me. You said you wanted to come.’

  ‘Garven is getting me down. A psychoanalyst working in my house as a butler. He’s determined to document her case history. Our lives will be an open book.’

  ‘Why don’t you go away?’

  ‘I can’t leave your mother. What are you saying? What are you telling me?’

  ‘Walk out. Leave her alone with Garven.’

  ‘Is that what she wants?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘I couldn’t do a thing like that,’ says Paul. ‘I couldn’t walk out and leave your mother in difficulties. She was in difficulties with Kiel. Now if she gets in difficulties with Garven—’

  ‘Something new,’ Pierre says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her difficulty with Kiel,’ Pierre says. ‘You never said before she was in difficulty with him.’

  ‘Well, she was. She’s a difficult woman, and he was a spy. Do you know what he did? He got himself taken prisoner by us, then he got himself a job with our intelligence unit on the pretext of being anti-Nazi. After he’d been broadcasting for our outfit six months he picked a fight and got himself sent back to the prison camp. Three days later he went on the air in a prisoners of war exchange-of-greetings programme. He sent a simple message to his mother and sister. But his voice was recognisable, you see. He’d been broadcasting for us. We were supposed to be an authentic underground German station. His voice was recognisable. We weren’t sure, but it was definitely possible that Kiel did it deliberately to betray our identity.’

  ‘Why was he allowed to do it? Wasn’t there any security?’

  Paul says, ‘You might well ask. Our security slipped up.’

  ‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ Pierre is saying as he flicks through the bound pages of a script lying on his knee.

  ‘Your mother was in difficulty with Kiel. She was suspected of having an affair with him. I had to get her out of that difficulty. And I did.’

  ‘You put Kiel in jail after the war?’

  ‘I was instrumental. Everyone else thought he was just a wild boy. But he was an agent, all right. I tracked him down as an S.S. man. He’d been in the S.S. all along. He started operating in the East after the war. I got him out of there. He did some damage but we got him in the end.’

  ‘Well he’s dead now,’ Pierre is saying. ‘Poor old Kiel.’

  ‘He’s here in New York,’ says Paul.

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ says Pierre.

  ‘Princess Xavier thinks so.’

  ‘Does she? I thought she didn’t.’

  ‘Sometimes she does,’ says the father, ‘and sometimes she doesn’t. You can’t trust women.’

  ‘Mother doesn’t think it’s Kiel. She thinks he looks too young.’

  ‘It depends,’ says Paul, ‘what she’s feeling like. One week she’ll say yes and the next week she’ll say no. I say yes.’

  ‘I say no,’ says Pierre. ‘I went and established it. He died in jail.’

  ‘The records are wrong. He must have had a body substituted for his.’

  ‘Why don’t you forget it?’ says Pierre.

  ‘My life’s in danger,’ says Paul. ‘Messages on the soles of shoes.’

  ‘Katerina says he’s a shoe store man, nothing more.’

  ‘Your sister Katerina’s a liar. She hasn’t been near him.’

  ‘She says she has.’

  ‘Yes, she says. She’s no good. She says anything.’

  ‘What does it matter? Spies don’t matter any more,’ Pierre says. ‘There isn’t any war and peace any more, no good and evil, no communism, no capitalism, no fascism. There’s only one area of conflict left and that’s between absurdity and intelligence.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says the father. ‘What are you trying to do to me, you and Katerina together? My life’s in danger. Look at your mother, she’s in difficulties.’

  ‘Her shadow falls the way it wants,’ Pierre says.

  ‘Stop!’ says Paul. ‘I won’t hear it!’

  ‘You think I haven’t noticed it?’

  ‘You must be crazy,’ says Paul. His throat beats with a throbbing that reaches his ears; help me, help me, cries the throb.

  ‘Peter Pan,’ says Pierre, ‘is going to be a very big success. We aren’t changing a word of it. We have permission to put it on; we have a contract. We didn’t tell the J. M. Barrie trustees that everyone who’s acting in it is over sixty. The age doesn’t come into the contract. They can’t stop us. It’ll be a riot.’

  ‘If we could get rid of Garven,’ Paul says, ‘I’d raise the money or the best part of it and help you. It sounds obscene, though.’

  ‘Peter Pan is a very obscene play. Our presentation will only help to direct attention to that fact,’ says Pierre, looking cornerwise at his father. ‘Our talent will reveal the absurdity of the thing. The show will be a success, a big success.’

  ‘If we could get rid of Garven,’ Paul says.

  ‘And Kiel? You still want to get rid of Kiel?’ says his son.

  ‘Of course. That’s the most urgent factor, Kiel.’

  ‘And Garven?’

  ‘Garven has to go.’

  ‘Set them one against the other,’ says the son.

  ‘How?’ says the father. ‘That’s what I ask. You think I haven’t thought of it?’

  ‘Money,’ says Pierre, ‘is how things are done.’

  ‘Not everything,’ says Paul, ‘that’s what you of the younger generation don’t realise.’

  ‘I’m not of the younger generation,’ Pierre says. ‘I’m only younger than you. The younger generation is a whole generation away from mine. Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I have to go,’ says Paul, clinking the ice at the bottom of his glass, then draining what liquid remains in it. He looks at his very flat gold wrist watch. ‘I have to go,’ he says.

  ‘To your analyst,’ Pierre says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to see your analyst.’

  ‘Who told you that
?’ says Paul.

  ‘The name of my informant,’ says the son, ‘is —let me see … what was it? … the name of my informant … the name of … the name. The name escapes me.’

  ‘Your informant has made a mistake.’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Pierre. ‘Oh no, nothing escapes my informant.’

  ‘What have you heard, what on earth have you heard?’ says Paul. ‘What’s this about me and an analyst?’

  ‘Well, of course she’s all right. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do as you please. Do as you please.’ Pierre’s right hand turns on his wrist permissively while his left hand flicks the neatly-bound acting script which lies now on a table by his chair. His long legs sprawl before him. ‘Rather narrow, ‘he says. He pats the script. ‘I mean she’s rather narrow to look at, I feel. One of those narrow-hipped, narrow-faced women who are just born that way and die that way. The effect is just simply narrow, except from the side where they protrude in a few places, nose, breasts, backside and feet. But her voice is just so awful. How can you stand it, Father? It’s so absolutely yak-yak-yak. It’s a poor way to spend one’s money in my view, but of course, that’s quite your business. Entirely your business.’

  Paul is standing now. His eye is on the playscript. His hand goes to the inside pocket of his coat.

  ‘Tell me about your production of Peter Pan,’ says Paul.

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘You need money for it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll need a few days. Maybe I could give you something in advance, though.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Yes, now. You did wrong to trail me. You shouldn’t have your father followed.’

  ‘I didn’t trail you at all. She trailed me. Very badly. She drew herself to my attention, did your narrow, narrow analyst.’

  ‘God help me!’ says Paul. ‘Your mother mustn’t hear of it.’

  ‘That is quite my point,’ Pierre says.

  ‘It’s blackmail, of course,’ Paul says.

  ‘Everything’s blackmail. But in fact it’s a good idea, good business, this production of Peter Pan. We’re not changing a word. It’ll be a riot. Everyone over sixty. That’s to say, if possible. We might have to settle for an actress around fifty-four to play Wendy.’

  ‘Is this what you brought me over here to tell me?’ the father says.

  ‘You suggested coming yourself. It was your idea.’

  ‘Sooner or later you would have told me all this.’

  ‘Oh, quite soon.’

  ‘But I’m sorry I came.’

  ‘Want another drink?’

  ‘I need more ice.’

  Pierre is chucking two little blocks of ice into his father’s glass while he says, ‘Need you call it blackmail, anyway?’ The father has not produced any cheque from his pocket. His hand is withdrawn from it, empty.

  ‘I need not call it anything. I don’t need to say anything. Islanders don’t need to speak to each other for survival. They act in unison. They do it by telepathy.’

  ‘We are not islanders here in New York.’

  ‘You and your sister never became Americanised in the sense that I was Anglicised.’

  ‘You are not very English,’ says Pierre, ‘although you may think you are.’

  ‘What it boils down to,’ says Paul, ‘is that you didn’t like that word “blackmail”.’

  ‘No, it could have been left to telepathy.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ says Paul, reaching again, really this time, for his cheque book, ‘I said it, and by God I’m glad I did.’

  V

  She stamps her right foot.

  ‘They fit like a glove,’ the salesman says.

  ‘No, they’re a bit large,’ she says. ‘When you lose weight as I have, you know, you lose it everywhere. Everything’s a bit large.’

  ‘You need a smaller size, a half-size smaller, Elsa,’ says the salesman, walking reflectively round her with his eyes on her feet. ‘I don’t know,’ he says in his precise foreign voice, ‘if we have a smaller size in that model. I’ll have to see.’

  She stamps her left foot. ‘Definitely too big. Boots especially — you know, they slip up and down your leg if they’re too big.’

  ‘A minute,’ he says, and goes to the back of the shop. Elsa yawns. A very thin woman with a champagne-coloured head of dead-looking hair and a long, squeezed, but distinguished face comes in and stares around, waiting it seems, for an assistant. It is the lunch-hour. No assistant appears, although Elsa’s man can be heard playing with cardboard boxes somewhere at the back and, from the sound, evidently high up on a ladder.

  ‘He won’t be a minute,’ Elsa tells the woman, and sits down.

  The woman sits down, too, and looks at Elsa’s shadow, then at her own, then at the other shadows, referring them, too, back to Elsa’s.

  ‘Yes,’ says Elsa.

  ‘What?’ says the woman.

  ‘Now you know,’ Elsa says.

  ‘Excuse me?’ says the woman.

  ‘You know it’s true, you’ve seen for yourself,’ Elsa says. ‘And now you can button up that common little mutation mink jacket and take yourself back to your office, and put through a call to my husband, and tell him that it’s true, he’s got a big problem, as he says. I’m tired of seeing you follow me around. You’ve been shadowing me for three weeks, but you’re a hopeless shadow.’

  Her real shadow makes a hopeless gesture in keeping with her real hand. The woman abruptly stands up.

  The salesman comes back with two boots, one brown, and one red. ‘Try these for size, Elsa. I’ll have to order them in black if you want them in black.’ Then he notices the other woman, and thinking her fretful, says to her, ‘Take a seat, Madam.’

  But she goes, buttoning her pale mink jacket, banging the glass door, so that the salesman frowns.

  ‘My husband’s analyst,’ Elsa says. ‘She’s been following me for three weeks.’

  ‘She looked upset,’ says the salesman.

  ‘I told her to clear off,’ says Elsa. ‘I was rude.’

  ‘Well, now she knows.’

  ‘Yes, now she knows. And I daresay she thinks you’re Helmut Kiel.’

  ‘From all you have told me, Elsa,’ says the salesman fondly, ‘I wish I had been that man.’

  She pulls up the boot, stands, and stamps her left foot.

  ‘Pierre’s play is opening at last, next Thursday, ‘she says.

  ‘You must be proud of your son,’ he says with a correct little bow.

  ‘Well I can’t say one way or another till I’ve seen the reviews.’

  He giggles, evidently delighted with her ways. ‘It should have opened last spring, but there was a hitch. My husband didn’t finance it enough, so I had to help. The theatre is called the Very Much Club, only it isn’t a club, it’s a theatre in Greenwich Village, I believe.’

  ‘Is it a good play?’ says the man, stroking the boots which Elsa has now taken off and handed to him.

  ‘It sounds awful. But it might make money. My son doesn’t need money.’

  ‘Why don’t you just grab your jewellery and run away?’ says her friend.

  ‘Why should I take my jewellery?’

  ‘That’s .what jewellery’s for. Every woman grabs her jewellery when she runs away, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Only if she has no money. In my case, I’m the one with the money.’

  ‘Then go wherever your money is,’ he says.

  ‘Switzerland,’ she says. ‘Switzerland, you know.’

  She is walking along the Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich, blown by the wind, indifferently passed by the other pedestrians but never jostled. It is so different from Manhattan where one is bumped into and almost placed under arrest by the otherwise occupied passers, and where people rush out of arcades and buildings stripping pieces of paper from candy-bars, then biting the bar and letting fall the paper as they hurry along.

  She is standing by the verge of the lake in Zürich, looking back
and forth from her reflection in the water to her shadow beside her, smiling at them both. She has lost weight and her shadow is thinner than it was last summer, even allowing for the bulk of her heavy coat and the bulge of the fur collar spreading obliquely behind her, while before her the same shape ripples. ‘You would have to know a lot about atmospheric physics,’ she thinks, while a large fat youth tramps methodically past her on his way to work, turning his head towards her with a note-taking interest neither more nor less than that of a humble adding-machine.

  Now, later in the morning, she is walking once more along the Bahnhofstrasse and glances at her shape in the reflections of the clean shop-windows. At the end she crosses the street, walks back a little way, turns off at a corner and into the hotel where she is staying. It is not quite twelve-thirty.

  Her friend from the shoe shop is waiting by the door.

  ‘Goodness!’ she says, ‘you really do remind me of that man Kiel I used to know. Just standing there, you looked for a moment so like him.’

  ‘Well I wish it was so, in a way, Elsa,’ he says, ‘now that you have said what you have said of your youth.’

  ‘Let’s go to the bar and have a drink,’ she says, ‘while we decide where to eat.’

  Fractional Manhattan is closed for Sunday but Paul Hazlett has set aside the afternoon, as he frequently does, to work over that anthology, his collection of personal problems old and new.

  The apartment on the East River is empty and hot. Paul tries to turn the handles of the radiators in the drawing-room, but they are all swivelled as far to the right as they will go; when they are in this position the heat should be turned off, but, as usual, the old-fashioned radiators burn like kindled stoves to the touch.

  The telephone rings and Paul stands up, first looking at it anxiously and then dashing across the floor not to miss it. A voice, when he answers, says, ‘Call for you from Zurich.’