The Hothouse by the East River

by Muriel Spark

  Elsa laughs. ‘Good morning, Garven,’ she says. ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘Good morning. How have I been? I’ve been about as usual. I’ve been waiting for you, it’s been a worry. Why did you go away like that, without warning?’

  ‘Is this place getting on your nerves, Garven?’ She turns to the porter. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you. Mr Hazlett will…’

  Paul fishes out his note-case and extracts a note, his fingers like pincers.

  ‘Goodbye now, thanks, lady, you’re welcome,’ says the porter as he leaves.

  ‘Garven only wants to help you,’ Paul says. ‘What a lame, lame, statement. I feel I want to help it over a stile,’ Elsa says.

  Paul says to Garven, ‘She’s in that sort of a mood.’

  ‘We thought you might be catching a late plane, Elsa,’ says Garven, feeling his unshaved chin.

  ‘I waited for your call, Elsa,’ Paul says.

  She goes into the drawing-room flanked by her walking shadow and followed by Paul and Garven. ‘Pretend I’m poor,’ she says. ‘Poor and crazy; just of no account.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee, Elsa?’ Garven says.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she says.

  Garven flaps off in. his gown and slippers while Paul sits down, watching her.

  He says, ‘Pierre’s play opens tonight. He kept seats for us in case we could make it. I said I’d let him know if you arrived in time.’

  ‘We could let him think I haven’t arrived yet.’

  ‘We should go and see our son’s play. It should be a success.’

  ‘Whose play? I thought Peter Pan was written by J. M. Barrie.’

  ‘Yes, but the production is Pierre’s idea. All old people. Very original, you must hand him that.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she says. ‘I’ll see how I feel when I get back from my shopping.’

  ‘You look well.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m on a new diet. Over-ripe tomatoes. Very rejuvenating.’ She presses the service bell, leans back her head and closes her eyes. After a while Garven comes in with a coffee-tray. ‘Did you ring?’ he says.

  Elsa opens her eyes. ‘I want some over-ripe tomatoes for my new diet.’

  ‘Over-ripe? — Not merely ripe?’

  ‘Mushy. The bacteria have a rejuvenating effect.’

  ‘Those Swiss cures,’ says Garven, ‘are … um, well…’

  ‘She looks all right,’ says Paul. ‘My wife looks good.’

  ‘Where would I buy rotten tomatoes?’ Garven says, looking straight at her shadow.

  ‘Get me the Princess Xavier on the phone,’ Elsa says. ‘She has plenty of everything.’

  Elsa comes into the drawing-room. Paul gasps. She is wearing a flame-coloured crepe evening dress. with dark beads gleaming at the hem and wrists. She wears a necklace and earrings made of diamonds and rubies. Her fingers are a complex of the same sparkling stones. She is wearing a diamond bracelet. She is saying ‘good evening’ to Paul while he gasps, and to Garven while he stares. Paul is wearing casual black trousers, a green. velvet coat and a black turtle-neck sweater. Garven wears a brown tweed coat, light fawn trousers and a shirt of blue and fawn check, open at the neck, where, inside the collar, a small dark blue silk scarf is knotted.

  Paul speaks. ‘You can’t go like that, Elsa,’ he says. ‘You’ll be lynched. You’ll be robbed. Do you realise where the theatre is? It’s somewhere off Houston Street away downtown.’

  ‘It’s the opening night,’ Elsa says. ‘My son’s play by J. M. Barrie.’

  ‘Elsa,’ says Garven, ‘this job is too much for me.’

  ‘You make more as my butler than you ever did as a doctor,’ she says. ‘However, if you want a raise I can give you a raise.’

  ‘I don’t want even. to be your analyst any more, ‘Garven says. ‘It isn’t a question of money, it’s a question that you’re eating away my life in nibbles. A nibble here and a nibble there. Sometimes I wake in the morning and wonder if I’m still alive.’

  ‘Now you know what it’s like,’ Paul says. ‘I’ve had a lifetime of it.’

  She looks at herself in the gold-framed oval glass, touches the jewels on each ear and says, ‘You leave this house without a stain on. your character. Don’t you like my dress? I borrowed the jewels from Van Cleef. They’re not fake, though. It’s just that it was too much trouble going to the bank, and there wasn’t really time to arrange for the detective-escort. I’d like a vodka tonic.’ She sits down. ‘Van. Cleef usually oblige.’

  ‘You look like something from the Garment District. What do you want to carry that big crocodile bag for?’

  ‘It’s Poppy’s bag. I promised to return it. I borrowed it months ago to carry some shoes in that I wanted copied at my shoemaker.’

  The front door rings.

  ‘There’s Poppy, it must be her. Garven, open the door for the Princess, and I would like a drink.’

  The bell rings again, louder, and Garven, shaking himself out of his state of near-hypnosis, jerks his gaze away from Elsa, turns and goes to open the door.

  ‘Elsa,’ says Paul. ‘This is a very small theatre in a very back street. It’s not only off-Broadway, it’s very off-off-Broadway. Experimental. Don’t you understand?’

  In sails the Princess Xavier, shedding her sable wraps, to reveal herself in. many folds of fair lace and flesh. She, too, is bearing a selection. of jewels about her person, and although they are less new and floodlit than Elsa’s, some of the diamonds being of the old cut which blacken through time, still, the total effect evidently does not strike Paul and Garven as being suitable. Paul stands perfectly still. Garven disappears with a frightened glance and can be heard treading softly towards the kitchen. as if he cannot believe the sound of his footsteps in his own ears. He can then be heard emptying ice from the tray into the ice-bucket.

  Meanwhile, the embraces between. the Princess and Elsa, fraught with wafts of lace and spangles like a little Dance of the Seven Veils, are taking place. ‘It must be a proud evening for you, Elsa,’ says the Princess as she gathers her robes about her, finally, on the sofa.

  ‘I came back by jet, I chartered a jet, specially to make it,’ Elsa says, sitting beside her on the sofa, erect with her body turned towards the reclining Princess and half of her behind overlapping the sofa’s edge. Elsa at the same time droops her eyelids, inclines her head romantically, and sighs. Then she turns round and makes herself comfortable, pounding the cushions into place behind her.

  ‘You know, Poppy,’ she says, ‘I’ve been thinking. My psyche is like a skyscraper, stretching up and up, practically all glass and steel so that one can look out over everything, and one never bends.’

  Paul sits down opposite them. ‘Garven would be sorry to miss that bit,’ he says. Garven can be heard returning. He comes in with a tray and a bucket of ice-cubes.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’ says the Princess to Garven.. Paul jumps up and busies himself with the drinks, while Garven, putting down the tray, hesitates what to reply.

  ‘You look all right, really,’ says the Princess.

  ‘I haven’t been sick,’ Garven says.

  ‘That’s the attitude I like to hear,’ the Princess says. ‘One should always conceal one’s problems.’

  ‘What problems?’ Garven says.

  ‘Poppy, what will you drink?’ says Paul, while Elsa laughs a little, then. stops. ‘Poppy,’ Elsa says, ‘you are skating on thin. ice.’

  ‘For you, also, vodka?’ Paul says to the Princess. His heart’s panic begins to rotate; I’m on the wrong train., he silently screams, an. express train going miles in the opposite direction. from where I want to go, and I can’t get off.

  ‘You’re all mad,’ says Garven, looking defiantly at Paul as if lacking the courage to direct himself at Elsa.

  ‘A rye on the rocks for me,’., says the Princess. ‘I left your rotten tomatoes on the hall table. How do you eat them? Do they go through the blender?’

  ‘There’s a special p
rocess,’ Elsa says.

  ‘Well, I’m quitting,’ Garven says. ‘So you needn’t explain your special process to me.’

  ‘The last time I came here,’ says the Princess, ‘Garven gave in his notice. I clearly remember.’

  ‘No, that was the maid. She never came back,’ says Elsa.

  ‘Oh, Garven or the maid, one of them,’ says the Princess. ‘You can’t count on anyone these days, can you?’ She has taken her drink from Paul who now gives Elsa her vodka and tonic. He looks at his watch.

  ‘We’ve got time,’ says Elsa.

  ‘It starts at seven-thirty,’ Paul says. ‘Hadn’t you better go and change?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Elsa says. ‘Imagine,’ she says to the Princess, ‘it’s my son’s opening night and he wants me to go dressed like a hippy. He should be wearing a dark suit, at least.’

  ‘I always dress,’ says the Princess. ‘Always have done and always will.’

  Suddenly Garven moves towards them, then stops. He opens his mouth wide, then says in a high-pitched top note, ‘Sick!’ He then shuts his mouth tight and turns to pour himself out a trembling drink.

  ‘Garven,’ says the Princess as they stand waiting for Elsa to get her coat, ‘I can. get you a remarkable job with a very delightful couple who have a triplex at Sixty-eighth and Park. Everything they have is an objet d’art including the teaspoons.’

  ‘Thanks, I’m going back to my practice,’ Garven says, and sighs.

  ‘He’s a professional man,’ says Paul.

  ‘I’ve wasted time,’ says Garven. ‘If she wants my services in future, she’ll have to come to my office.’

  Paul takes out his handkerchief and pats his forehead here and there. ‘This apartment kills me,’ he says. ‘It’s antiquated. The heat’s terrible. You can’t control it. Poppy, can’t you talk to Elsa about moving to a new apartment? I’ve tried for years. She won’t listen to me.’

  ‘One gets attached to one’s home,’ Poppy says. ‘Can’t you have it fixed? Open the window.’

  ‘It’s open,’ says Paul. ‘But the heat wins.’

  Garven says, ‘I’d have all the air-conditioners turned on full if I had my way.’

  ‘She likes the heat in winter,’ says Paul. ‘It’s good for the palm tree,’ says the Princess, looking at the flourishing plants in the corner.

  ‘I tell you what, Poppy,’ says Paul. ‘She has too much money. Some women can’t take it. In the old days when she didn’t have so much she was more amenable to reason.’

  ‘Ha, ha, so was I,’ says the Princess. ‘But I’m healthier and happier now, and so is Elsa.’

  ‘I agree with Paul,’ says Garven. ‘Not on every point, but on this one.’

  Elsa calls out from the hall. ‘Come on, I’m ready.’ Princess Xavier is carefully handled out of her hollow on the sofa by Paul and Garven and is escorted to the hall where Elsa is waiting.

  ‘You can’t go like that,’ Paul says. Elsa is wearing a long coat of white fox fur. ‘I bought it in Paris,’ she says, ‘for this occasion.’

  ‘I believe in. style,’ says Princess Xavier, who, with the help of Garven is being enfolded in her voluminous sable coverings which give off little wafts of something that smells like a strange incense, but is in reality a mixture of camphor and a scent named Diane du Bois. How long, cries Paul in his heart, will these people, this city, haunt me? ‘Elsa,’ he says, ‘be yourself. Just be yourself, I ask you.’

  They are driving through the streets in Princess Xavier’s Rolls. A long journey through the traffic, with the Princess’s chauffeur muttering quietly all the way down Second Avenue. He stops to let them off at a convenient corner, conspicuously. And nervously Paul and Garven propel the women in haste along the narrow pavements. A girl tries to block Elsa’s path, saying in a slow solemn voice, ‘That is too much,’ but Paul pushes his wife ahead causing the girl to stumble and bump into Garven who follows with the Princess. ‘Wait a minute,’ says the girl to Garven, but he waits not at all, barging past the other pedestrians with his charge, the breathless Princess. Paul is watching the street numbers with shifty eyes. He stops at a doorway between a delicatessen shop and a Mexican. art gallery. A woman comes to the door of the delicatessen, followed by a young boy. ‘They robbed their grandmother’s tomb,’ says the woman.

  ‘This must be it,’ says Paul, pushing Elsa through a doorway between the two shops where a sign-board announces:

  Very Much Club

  Advanced Theatre.

  Followed by Garven and the Princess they file along a bright-lit passage to a curtained doorway. Here, tickets are being collected and sold by two lean. young men who are accompanied by a group of supporters. One of them is Pierre who has now grown a small beard and is wearing a white turtle-necked sweater and red velvet trousers. His friend, beefy Peregrine, with Katerina leaning on him in a stupefied way, stands by. Peregrine says to Pierre, ‘Here comes your tribe.’

  A girl holding a bundle of programmes comes forward to greet them. ‘Good evening,’ she says. ‘I’m Alice.’ A young man standing beside her says, ‘I’m Ken.’

  ‘Really?’ says Elsa. ‘You don’t look it.’

  Pierre turns as his mother speaks. She is already causing a stir, but Pierre looks at her languidly, as one well accustomed to absorb any shock. Katerina sways a little, stands lankily upright for a moment, then leans back on bulky Peregrine. ‘Am I on a trip or is she real?’ Katerina says.

  ‘Both,’ says Elsa.

  ‘We’d better get to our seats,’ Paul says uneasily, taking Princess Xavier’s arm to edge her out of the little crowd. Garven follows with an anxious, trapped look.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ says Elsa, ‘I want to see these photographs.’ She pushes through a cluster of people who, now somewhat hypnotised, make way for her.

  On a wall a poster announces the show ‘Peter Pan — Unexpurgated’, followed by a list of the cast. This is flanked by numerous large stills of the play. An aged baby-faced Peter Pan. with his elfin cap holds up to his old lips with knobbly fingers a grandiose horn. The caption reads, ‘Miles Bunting, the Broadway veteran., plays Peter, the boy who never grew up.’

  ‘Well, Poppy,’ says Elsa to the Princess, ‘what do you make of this? Miles Bunting. Is it the same Miles Bunting we used to work with during the war? Remember, at the Compound?’

  ‘He was a professor of something,’ says Princess Xavier, scrutinising the photograph. ‘He was never an actor,’ She turns to Paul. ‘Do you remember Miles Bunting?’ she says.

  Paul is looking over her shoulder at the photograph. Something has gone wrong, he is thinking. Life can’t be like this, I simply don’t accept it. He says, ‘To me, it looks the same man, greatly altered of course. Much fuller in the face. But the mouth, the nose, the eyes, all the features in fact. The name alone could be a coincidence, but the face…’

  ‘Lady, you come to the wrong playhouse,’ says a man’s voice behind them.

  A girl laughs, then Pierre’s voice says, ‘My mother has come to the right place.’

  ‘And there’s Wendy,’ says Elsa. ‘Who’s playing Wendy?’ Anyone we know or used to know?’

  ‘Curly Curtiss,’ the Princess reads in a loud voice from the caption. The picture is that of a haggard and bony woman with glittering eyes and wild long white hair. ‘I don’t recall any Curly Curtiss, though, do you Paul?’

  Paul does not reply.

  ‘What’s curly about her?’ Elsa says, peering at the picture.

  Garven says, ‘I think we ought to move on. I really think we should take our seats as unobtrusively as possible.’

  At which Katerina comes out of her trance and gives a loud unearthly laugh.

  They troop into the little theatre, through the curtains held open impassively by Pierre. He follows them, guiding them with his voice. ‘Right down to the front. There are four seats reserved in the front row.’

  The theatre is already almost full. Someone in the audience has started to applaud as Elsa and
the Princess appear. Then a few others applaud merrily. ‘She left her tiara in the bank,’ says someone.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ yells another voice. ‘She’s free to wear what she likes isn’t she? Like you’re free and I’m free.’

  Elsa, settling in her seat, lets her white foxes fall from her shoulder.

  ‘Those jewels real?’ says someone.

  Princess Xavier, who has been settled with difficulty in her seat between Garven and Paul, now makes further difficulties for them by rising. She turns to the audience and calls out, ‘Our jewels are as real as you are.’

  This wins further applause.

  The Princess allows herself to be helped back into her seat, complaining, ‘We’ve been far-out longer than they have.’

  A man slinks down the aisle, and takes a flash picture of the group of four. Paul starts with fright. Garven looks fiercely at Elsa. But the house has filled and the hubbub becomes a murmur. Soon a hush falls and the curtain rises.

  ‘It’s a crime to do this to a little kids’ entertainment,’ someone says after the first act. ‘It’s sick.’

  ‘Sick is interesting. Sick is real.’

  All the same, laughter has arisen., has roared and has filtered away to silence again. and again during the first act.

  ‘I find it a bit baleful,’ says the Princess. ‘It’s a great idea,’ says Garven. ‘It gives you another dimension, seeing all those old hands. Peter Pan was really good when. he flew in.. It must have been a strain on the old fellow. I must say it was hilarious. It’s going down well. It’s —‘Garven’s enthusiasm,’ says Elsa, ‘tells me a lot about Garven. I wonder what the people who licensed the play are going to do when they find out that it’s being presented as an obscene show?’

  ‘It isn’t obscene,’ says Garven. ‘That’s to say, Peter Pan’s a deeply relevant psychological problem.’

  ‘There’s going to be trouble,’ Elsa says.

  ‘What can they do?’ says Paul. ‘They’ve licensed the play. I went into this angle with Pierre when I put up the money. The trustees don’t have any casting rights. All the novelty of the interpretation. is in the cast. Nothing else is changed. Old people instead of young.’