Symposium

by Muriel Spark

  ‘We should be careful not to spoil him,’ Ella said when Luke had become a very constant visitor, especially during her husband’s absences.

  Ernst said, ‘Don’t give him money.

  ‘I won’t. He hasn’t asked for any,’ said Ella.

  ‘Good. Give him a drink, a meal, it’s quite enough. Let him lay the table and wash up.’

  ‘He generally does that. I’m hoping he’ll help me to look for a flat.’

  Ernst and Ella had one child, a daughter, recently married and now living in New York. Luke was, in a way, filling the gap that she had left. Ernst, so clever, so good at languages, with his Continental connections, preferred his life in Brussels, but since Ella had determined to follow a career in London he was fairly happy to see Luke on his London visits which sometimes lasted as long as a week. Fairly happy the first month of their meeting and now, at the end of the second month, he was becoming strangely delirious. The old madness, the old excitement was affecting Ernst, all he did and thought, there lurking at the back of his mind: young Luke; at those serious meetings and conventions, at those private business lunches: young Luke. I am mad about him, mad, thought Ernst, slashing on his seat-belt and driving away from Heathrow through the traffic towards Luke, with Ella there also, in and out of the furnished flat: ‘What lovely flowers.’ Sometimes they telephoned down to room-service for their meal, sometimes they prepared it there in the flat’s galley-kitchen and ate it at the kitchen counter.

  ‘Stay for supper,’ said Ernst to Luke.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Luke, looking at his watch. ‘I’m booked for a party, helping behind the buffet, eight to twelve.’

  ‘How do you get through your studies with all this evening work?’ says Ella.

  ‘I don’t need to study much,’ Luke said. ‘It’s enough I attend the lectures. I recall everything. A matter of a good brain.’

  ‘Well, I admire you for doing these jobs,’ said Ernst. ‘Not all young people would do it.’

  ‘A good brain …’ mused Luke, admiring his own reflection in the deep pool of his mind’s eye.

  He was far away from Ernst’s moral approbation. He was drinking a beer from a can.

  Ella left the room to take off her outdoor things. She came back in her blouse and trousers, having changed into a pair of bright green shoes with four-inch heels. Luke looked again at his watch. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Oh, what a lovely watch! It’s new, isn’t it?’ Ella said.

  ‘Fairly,’ said Luke. He kissed her, waved across to Ernst, and left.

  Ella took a dry martini. She sat down beside Ernst on the sofa. ‘Well!’ she said. She leaned forward to arrange an iris better in the vase.

  ‘Well, what?’ said Ernst.

  ‘The watch,’ she said. ‘Patek Philippe.’

  ‘It looked expensive,’ he said, tentatively, watching her.

  ‘You should know,’ said Ella.

  ‘I do know,’ said Ernst. ‘And no doubt you know better.’

  ‘You gave him that watch, Ernst.’

  ‘No, I imagined you did,’ he said.

  ‘I did? You thought I did?’

  ‘Well, didn’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Of course not. How could I? Why should I? If he got it from you, on the other hand, I suppose there would be a motive.‘ Her folded feet in the green shoes with their long thin heels were poised on the coffee table.

  ‘I haven’t given him anything, Ella,’ he said. ‘I wonder who gave him that watch?’ Ernst sounded worried. ‘Thousands of dollars, it represents wealth.’

  ‘You were hoping I’d given it to him,’ said Ella.

  ‘I hope nothing. I only wonder,’ said Ernst.

  ‘I was hoping it was a present from you,’ said Ella. ‘If it wasn’t I feel strangely afraid.’

  ‘It wasn’t a present from me. I, too, feel a sort of fear. It isn’t so much the watch, it’s the unknown factor,’ said Ernst.

  ‘If you weren’t attracted to him there would be no need to be afraid,’ Ella said.

  ‘If we weren’t both attracted,’ he said.

  ‘You, perhaps, more than me,’ she said. ‘But all the same, I don’t want to be involved with danger. Luke plus an unknown rich benefactor is danger. What do we know about him, after all?’

  ‘Oh, we know a good deal,’ said Ernst. ‘He’s awfully bright and he’s not afraid of doing humble work to make his living. Quite remarkable in a boy his age. You should ask him, Ella, where he got that watch.’

  ‘I couldn’t dream of asking him.’

  ‘I mean in a sort of maternal way. You could do it.’

  ‘Why don’t you? In a sort of paternal way.’

  ‘I don’t feel like a parent towards Luke.’

  ‘Well, in any case, parents shouldn’t interfere, nobody should interfere with a grown man. Luke should be free to come and go without our probing,’ she said.

  They decided to go out to dinner. Ella put on her street shoes and they walked to a Greek restaurant.

  ‘I met Hurley Reed today,’ said Ella. ‘He’s advising a television company on a film that portrays an artist.’

  ‘They never get it right,’ said Ernst. ‘It never looks right. Pushing their brush into a palette and patting it delicately on to the canvas, all the while reciting an important piece of dialogue, supposed to be a conversation, with someone who has happened to drop in on them. In the studio. Do you think painters keep open house in their studios?’

  ‘That’s television and the world of films,’ Ella said. ‘One reads, sometimes, of painters who used to be available while working.’

  ‘That was in Henry James. Can’t the television make it more convincing? What are they paying Hurley? He’s well-off. Doesn’t need the job.’

  Ella said, ‘You know, I don’t think money is the driving force, there.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Ernst, for after all, he was a fair-minded man. ‘Not that I admire his paintings. If there are messages in pictures I have got the message. I tell you, Ella, that those flat backdrops like posters — deserted dodgems at the seaside or a wooden impassive nurse standing beside a Red Cross van — remind me of the bureaucratic life. Yet he sells for exaggerated prices.‘

  ‘Chris Donovan hypes them up. Of course she believes in Hurley,’ said Ella, and she thought, Ernst can’t help mixing up the price of a thing with the thing itself.

  ‘Nothing sings, nothing flows. There are only inanimate signs. They blow neither hot nor cold because they can’t blow at all,’ said Ernst. ‘And yet they fetch thousands.’

  It was true that Ernst had good taste. He went to auctions and enjoyed the putting of a money value on every work of art. He knew it was the wrong attitude, but he couldn’t get out of the habit. He was a Catholic. When he visited the Pope, even then, he couldn’t help calculating the Pope’s worldly riches (life-proprietor of the Sistine Chapel, landlord of the Vatican and contents …). Ernst knew it was a frightful habit, but he told himself it was realistic; and it was too exciting altogether ever to give up, this mental calculation of what beauty was worth on the current market.

  By unspoken consent Ella and Ernst were not sleeping together any more. If only she knew whether he had slept with Luke. How promiscuous was Luke? The dread disease. For that matter, if only he knew she had not slept with Luke there would be a break in the tension. As it was you slept with everyone they had slept with for the last ten years. There were contraceptives, but it would be an innovation for Ernst. She thought, you can die of it ten years hence and I don’t want to. Ernst thought the same. The trouble was they didn’t know Luke, and perhaps Luke didn’t know himself.

  Thinking of Luke now, Ernst’s head swam. No sex, absolutely no sex. Romantic love has changed, but absolutely so. Nobody in their senses can be carried away any more, secure in the simple swallowed pill. Now people watch each other. Ella suspects me. She suspects that I suspect her. We could both be right. It’s like that vile practice of watching to see if your wife, your husba
nd, goes to Holy Communion. Now they watch for the contraceptive act.

  Ernst began to think of his work. Heads of states and their minions sitting at large round tables with interpreters and bottles of mineral water, having such slow, such slow, conversations. Elementary thoughts.

  ‘Chris and Hurley are planning a dinner in a few weeks’ time. I hope you’ll be here?’ said Ella.

  ‘Yes, I’ll be in London next week for a month.’

  They walked home. The Greek food they had eaten lay on their stomachs like stodgy. They agreed: no more Greek food. Never again.

  IT was the first week of October, over two weeks before the dinner that Chris Donovan and Hurley Reed were planning to give in London. Venice was still warm, still crowded at the Rialto Bridge, St Mark’s Square and the other main points of profuse attraction. Margaret Damien, so recently Margaret Murchie, and her husband William were on the second week of their honeymoon, the first of which they had spent in Florence. With only a few days left, they were writing postcards as they sat in Florian’s overpriced café.

  ‘Venice is a whore,’ said William.

  ‘You’re not writing that down, are you?’ said Margaret. ‘It goes through the open post. People can read.’

  ‘No, but it’s what I think,’ he said cheerfully.

  But Margaret became solemn. ‘We should think positively,’ she said. ‘Venice is, after all, unique.’

  One of the things he admired about his wife was her moralistic tendency, and especially her refusal to speak ill of anybody. It was old-fashioned and refreshing. Very unusual and people noticed it.

  Margaret came from St Andrews. She was tall, like William — if anything, slightly taller.

  ‘Florence is unique, but you had your bag snatched,’ he said, hoping to provoke another piece of sermonizing. When she said nothing, he added, ‘Florence is also a harlot, of course.’

  ‘Florence was magnificent, it was sublime.’ She spoke as if Florence no longer existed except in their memory.

  Her face, arms and legs were honey-tanned. William’s skin was darker. Margaret would have been a Titian-haired beauty had it not been for her protruding teeth. She had a melodious voice which made the sentiments she expressed all the more mellifluous. William had good grey eyes and a pleasant mouth. He was robust, not yet fat. She was twenty-three and he was twenty-nine; they had met in London in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s, Oxford Street, less than four months ago. She had spoken first:

  ‘Be careful, those grapefruits look a little bruised.’

  He was enchanted right away, having just broken rowdily with a girl he had been living with for almost two years — and she declared herself amazed, later that evening at about ten past eleven, to find that he knew a couple who were related to a girl she worked with in the office in Park Lane which was the publicity centre for a petrol company. William had a job as a junior researcher in artificial intelligence, the bionics branch. He explained this artificial intelligence: the study of animal intelligence-systems as patterns for mechanical devices, a mixed science involving electronics and biology. She was excited by this, wanted to know more and more. She demonstrated such excited interest in the idea that he thought at first she was putting it on. What attracted her was that the capacity of, say, a cat to concentrate its eyesight intensely on one relevant item, screening out the irrelevant, could be studied and copied by human mechanic processes. The frog, the beetle and the bat — experts in their fields … ‘And the snake?’ she said. ‘The snake, too,’ he told her. ‘We can learn from the snake as a biological prototype for synthetic systems.’

  Now they were married and walking round Venice as if they had come out of the picture postcards they had just written.

  ‘It’s intoxicating,’ she said.

  ‘The smell’s awful,’ said William.

  But in that way of hers that he admired so much, she said something about the smell so as to make it of no account. Something about high tides and low tides, always, over the centuries; William didn’t catch what it was she actually said; it was not memorable, but her attitude was really, as always, on the side of light.

  He took her round the back alleys and lanes of Venice, away from the canals.

  ‘A friend of mine paints these,’ he said. ‘He calls himself an anti-Canaletto. No bridges and palaces. He’s an American artist called Hurley Reed. Everything he does is very squared off and precise, like photographs. You can imagine what he makes of these houses. Very wooden-looking but somewhat interesting, especially painted under the usual Venetian sky which is the only patch of nature to be seen. He’s anti lots of things.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Well, of course, you shall. He’s a friend of mine. A good deal older, of course. In his early fifties, something like that. He lives with Chris Donovan, another friend of mine and my mother’s.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Chris is a she. She’s an Australian widow, very rich. I love Chris, she’s a good sort. Everyone loves Chris. You’ll meet her, too. They live in Islington. They give wonderful parties.’

  ‘What sort of age is she?’

  ‘Ageless. Maybe forty, maybe fifty. Of course she has the money to preserve her looks.’

  ‘It’s the expression that counts,’ said Margaret. ‘It’s the expression that reveals the inner person.’

  William experienced a slightly heretical or treacherous cloud of a thought: Can I keep up with all this goodness and honeymoon sweetness of hers? So pale honey-yellow and pale moon-grey in tone. I’m bound to put my muddy boots on the vast soft carpet of her character. One of these days, I’ll err …

  He took her on a vaporetto to see some Tintorettos, to see Giorgione, to marvel at the mosaics. She was so carried away by the famous Assumption in the Frari that it was on the tip of William’s tongue to beg her not to levitate.

  But it seemed to him it was only in art that their minds really differed. Her moral charm, to him, exacted a small price: she liked art to have an exalted message whereas if there was anything he hated in art, as in life, it was a sermon. She bought a Venetian doll for herself and a toy gondolier for him. It made him feel cosy.

  When they were home from their honeymoon, one of the first letters they opened was an invitation from Chris Donovan and Hurley Reed, to dinner on the 18th of October.

  William rang to accept and asked Hurley Reed to come in for a drink soon, and meet Margaret. Which Hurley did, the next evening.

  Margaret had filled the sitting-room with autumn leaves from the florist. She was wearing a longish green velvet dress with flapping sleeves. Hurley was wondering what she had to pose about in that pre-Raphaelite way. To his astonishment William was apparently besotted with his bride.

  She was the sort of girl who made Hurley very homesick for America and a touch of good sense in a woman. What is wrong with her, he wondered, looking at Margaret, that she has to drape herself in green velvet against a background of fall foliage? She could look wonderful in a plain civilian outfit. Why doesn’t she get her teeth fixed?

  All the time he was thinking this, he was talking. ‘We were sorry to miss your wedding. We didn’t get back in time from New York. Your mother was there of course,’ he said to William.

  ‘Oh, yes, she came.’

  ‘All the way to Inverness?’

  ‘St Andrews,’ said the girl.

  ‘Oh, yes, St Andrews. Lovely place. So clear, a beautiful light. And how is Hilda?’

  Hilda Damien, William’s mother, lived in Australia. She was a friend of Hurley’s life-companion Chris Donovan. Hilda, too, was now immensely rich, having made her own money through her own cleverness. Twenty years back she was already a widow of very small means. She now owned five newspapers and a chain of department stores. A magnate, was Hilda.

  ‘She came just for the wedding,’ William said. ‘And then she flew right back. But she’ll be here again shortly to settle about our new flat.’

  ‘I expe
ct you got a fine wedding present?’ Hurley fished.

  ‘Yes, exactly that. We got a flat in Hampstead. It’s being done up.’

  ‘Good. You’re lucky.’

  ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ said Margaret.

  ‘Hilda’s a good sort,’ said Hurley.

  ‘Absolutely immersed in the philosophy of Les Autres,’ said Margaret.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have another drink,’ said William, taking Hurley’s glass to fill it with ice, vodka and tonic.

  ‘The philosophy’, said Margaret ‘of Les Autres is a revival of something old. Very new and very old. It means we have to centre our thoughts and actions away from ourselves and entirely on to other people.’

  ‘Oh, meaning the others. Why is it expressed in French?’

  ‘It’s a French movement,’ said Margaret. ‘Well, Hilda, as I say, exemplifies La Philosophie des Autres. She really does.’

  ‘Good, well, we’ll see you on the 18th. Ten of us, informal.’ Hurley left half of his drink, and William saw him to the door.’

  ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ said William. ‘An amazing sweet character. Do you know where we met?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Marks & Spencer’s. I was buying fruit. Do you know what she said? — She said, “Be careful, those grapefruits look bruised.” And so they were.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Hurley Reed.

  ‘I DON’T give it a year,‘ said Hurley Reed. He was referring to William Damien’s marriage. He was dining alone with his Chris, after visiting the Damiens. Chris wanted to know more. ‘Who are the Murchies? She was a Miss Murchie.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Hurley. He told her what he thought she really wanted to know. ‘Quite nice looking, but terrible teeth, they quite spoil her. I think she’s shy or something. There’s something funny. Her get-up wasn’t natural for a young girl at six-thirty on a normal evening. She had green velvet, a wonderful green, and a massive background of red and gold leaves all arranged in pots.’