by Muriel Spark
‘Very nice,’ I said.
The young clerk was silent.
‘You’re very quiet tonight, Mr Fleming,’ said Maida.
He gave a jerky laugh which nearly knocked over his cup.
‘I saw Mrs Marais today,’ he ventured.
‘Oh, her,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Did you speak?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said; ‘I just passed her by.’
‘Quite right,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.
‘I gave them notice,’ she explained to me. ‘Mr wasn’t so bad, but Mrs was the worst tenant I’ve ever had.’
‘The things she said!’ Greta added.
‘I showed her every consideration,’ said the pawnbroker’s wife, ‘and all I got was insults.’
‘Insults,’ Mr Fleming said.
‘Mr Fleming was here when it happened,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.
‘We were showing her Isa’s picture,’ she continued, ‘and do you believe it, she said it wasn’t Isa at all. To my face she as good as called me a liar, didn’t she, Mr Fleming?’
‘That’s true,’ said Mr Fleming, examining a tea-leaf on his spoon.
‘Mr Marais, of course, was in an awkward position,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘You see, he’s right under his wife’s thumb, and he didn’t dare contradict her. He only said there might be some mistake. But she sat on him at once. “That’s not Isa,” she said.’
‘Poor Mr Marais!’ said Greta.
‘I’m sorry for Mr Marais,’ said Maida.
‘He’s soft in the head, man,’ said Isa.
‘Isa’s a real scream,’ said her mother when she had recovered from her gust of laughter. ‘And she’s right. Old Marais isn’t all there.’
‘What was it again?’ she inquired of the young clerk. ‘What was it again, that old Marais told you afterwards, about Isa’s picture?’
The young clerk looked at me, and quickly looked away.
‘What did Mr Marais say about the picture?’ I said insistently.
‘Well,’ said Mr Fleming, ‘I don’t really remember.’
‘Now, you remember all right,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Come on, give us a laugh.’
‘Oh, he only said,’ Mr Fleming replied, gazing manfully at the painting, ‘he only said there were railway lines and a train in the picture.’
‘Only said!’ Mrs Jan Cloote put in.
‘Well, poor thing,’ said Mr Fleming; ‘he can’t help it, I suppose. He’s mad.’
‘And didn’t he say there was an old-fashioned car in the picture, man?’ said Greta. ‘That’s what you told us, man.
‘Yes,’ said the clerk, with a giggle, ‘he said that too.’
‘So you see,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘The man’s out of his mind. A railway in Isa’s picture! I laugh every time I think of it.’
‘As for Mrs Marais,’ she added; ‘as for her, I never trusted the woman from the start. “Mrs Marais,” said I, “you’ll take a week’s notice.” And they left the next day.’
‘Good riddance to the old bitch,’ said Isa.
‘She was jealous of Isa’s picture, eh,’ chuckled Greta.
‘We had a nice time with the artist, though, when he was painting Isa,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.
‘I’ll say, man,’ said Maida, ‘and the crew as well.’
‘We often have famous artists here,’ said the mother, ‘don’t we?’
‘We do, man,’ said Greta. ‘They come after Isa.’
‘And the crew,’ said Maida. ‘They was nice. But the pilot did a real man’s trick on Isa.’
‘Yes, the swine,’ said the mother. ‘But never mind, Isa’s got other boys. Isa could go on the films.’
‘Isa would be great on the films,’ said Greta.
‘All the famous actors come here,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘We get all the actors. They want Isa for the films. But we wouldn’t let her go on the films.’
‘She’d be a star, man,’ said Greta.
‘But we wouldn’t let her go on the films,’ Maida said.
‘She’ll do what she likes,’ said the mother, ‘when she leaves school.’
‘Bloody right,’ said Isa.
‘You know Max Melville?’ said Mrs Jan Cloote to me.
‘I’ve heard the name …’ I said warily.
‘Heard the name! Why, Max Melville’s a top-ranking star! He was here after Isa the other day. Isn’t that right, Greta?’
‘Sure,’ said Greta.
And Mrs Jan Cloote took up the story again. ‘I told him there was too much publicity on the films for Isa. “We’re quiet folk, Max,” I said. Max, I called him, just like that.’
‘Max was a rare guy,’ said Maida.
‘He gave Isa a wonderful present,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Not that it’s worth much, but it belonged to his family and it’s got the sentimental value, and he wouldn’t have parted with it to anyone else but Isa. Run upstairs and fetch it, Maida.’
Maida hesitated. ‘Was it that brooch …?’ she began.
‘No,’ said her mother sorrowfully and slowly. ‘Isa got the brooch from the artist. I’m surprised at you forgetting what Max Melville gave to Isa.’
‘I’ll get it,’ said Greta, jumping up.
She returned presently, with a small compass in her hand.
‘It isn’t worth much,’ Mrs Jan Cloote was saying as she handed it round. ‘But Max’s great-grandfather was an explorer, and he had this very compass on him when he crossed the Himalayas. He never came back, but the compass was found on his body. So it was very very precious to Marie, but he parted with it to Isa.’
I had been given the compass when I was fourteen; it was new then; I recognized it immediately, and while Mrs Jan Cloote was talking, I recognized it more and more. The scratches and dents which I made on my own possessions are always familiar to me, like my own signature …
‘A very old antique compass,’ said the pawnbroker’s wife, passing her hand over its face appraisingly. ‘It was nice of Max Melville to give it away. But of course he wanted Isa for the films, and that may have been the reason.’
‘What do you think of it?’ she asked me.
‘Very interesting,’ I said.
What voyager had fetched it over the seas? How many hands had it passed through in its passage from the pawnshop where I had pledged it, to the pawnshop of Mrs Jan Cloote? I wondered these things, and also, why it was that I didn’t really mind seeing my compass caressed by the hands of this pawnbroker’s wife — seeing it made to serve her pleasure. I didn’t care. Her nose pointed towards it, as to a North …
‘We shall never part with this,’ Mrs Jan Cloote was saying; ‘because of the sentimental reason, you know. It wouldn’t fetch a price, of course.’
I had, for a few years, kept the compass lying about amongst my things, until the day came to pawn it. That was how it had got scratched and knocked about. It was knocked about in the drawer, thrown aside always, because I was looking for something else. I had never used the compass, never taken my bearings by it. Perhaps, it had never been very much used at all. The marks of wear upon it were mainly those I had made. Whoever had pledged it at Mrs Jan Cloote’s pawnshop did not think enough of it to redeem it. The pawnbroker’s wife was welcome to the compass, for it was truly hers.
‘It wouldn’t fetch a price,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Not that we think of the price; it’s the thought that matters.
‘It’s Isa’s lucky mascot,’ said Maida. ‘You’ll have to take it with you when you go to Hollywood, Isa, man.
‘Hollywood!’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Oh, no, no. If Isa goes on the pictures she’ll go to an English studio. There’s too much publicity in Hollywood. Do you see our Isa in Hollywood, Mr Fleming?’
‘Not exactly,’ said the young man.
‘I’d be great in Hollywood, man,’ said young Isa.
‘Well, maybe …’ said the mother.
‘Yes, maybe,’ said Mr Fleming.
‘But there’s too much show in Hollywood,’ said Isa.
‘Yo
u see,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, turning to me, ‘we’re quiet people. We keep ourselves to ourselves, and as Mr Fleming was saying the other day, we live in quite a world of our own, don’t we, Mr Fleming?’
They opened the door and let me sidle through, into the dark hall.
The Snobs
‘Snob: A person who sets too much value on social standing, wishing to be associated with the upper class and their mores, and treating those viewed as inferior with condescension and contempt’ — Chambers Dictionary.
I feel bound to quote the above definition, it so well fits the Ringer-Smith couple whom I knew in the nineteen-fifties and of whom I have since met variations and versions enough to fill me with wonder. Snobs are really amazing. They mainly err in failing to fool the very set of people they are hoping to be accepted by, and above all, to seem to belong to, to be taken for. They may live in a democratic society — it does nothing to help, Nothing.
Of the Ringer-Smith couple, he, Jake, was the more snobbish. She, at least, had a certain natural serenity of behaviour which she herself never questioned. She was in fact rather smug. Her background was of small land-owning farmers and minor civil servants. She, Marion, was stingy, stingy as hell. Jake also had a civil service background and, on the mother’s side, a family of fruit export-import affairs which had not left her very well off, the inheritance having been absorbed by the male members of the family. Jake and Marion were a fairly suitable match. He was slightly the shorter of the two. Both were skinny. They had no children. Skeletons in the family cupboard do nothing to daunt the true snob, in fact they provoke a certain arrogance, and this was the case with Jake. A family scandal on a national scale had grown to an international one. A spectacular bank robbery with murder on the part of a brother had resulted in the family name being reduced to a byword in every household. The delinquent Ringer-Smith and his associates had escaped to a safe exile in South America leaving Jake and his ageing mother to face the music of the press and TV reporters. Nobody would have taken it out on them in the normal way if it had not been for the contempt with which they treated police, journalists, interrogators, functionaries of the law and the public in general. They put on airs suggesting that they were untouchably ‘good family’, and they generally carried on as if they were earls and marquises instead of ordinary middle-class people. No earl, no marquis at present alive would in fact be so haughty unless he were completely out of his mind or perhaps an unfortunate drug addict or losing gambler.
I was staying with some friends at a château near Dijon when the Ringer-Smiths turned up. This was in the nineties. I hardly recognized them. The Ringer-Smiths had not just turned up at the château, they were found by Anne, bewildered, outside the village shop, puzzling over a map, uncertain of their way to anywhere. Warming towards their plight as she always would towards those in trouble, Anne invited these lost English people for a cup of tea at the château where they could work out their route.
Anne and Monty, English themselves, had lived in the château for the last eight years. It was a totally unexpected inheritance from the last member of a distant branch of Monty’s family. The house and small fortune that went with it came to him in his early fifties as an enormous surprise. He had been a shoe salesman and a bus driver, among other things. Anne had been a stockbroker’s secretary. Their two children, both girls, were married and away. The ‘fairy tale’ story of their inheritance was in the newspapers for a day, but it wasn’t everybody who read the passing news.
Monty was out when Anne brought home the Ringer-Smiths. I was watching the television — some programme which now escapes me for ever due to the shock of seeing those people. Anne, tall, merry, blonded-up and carrying her sixties well, took herself off to the kitchen to put on the kettle. She had made the sitting room as much like England as possible.
‘Who does this place belong to?’ Jake inquired of me as soon as Anne was out of the room. Obviously, he had not recognized me in the present context, although I felt Marion’s eyes upon me in a penetrating stare of puzzlement, of quasi-remembrance.
‘It belongs,’ I said, ‘to the lady who invited you to tea.’
‘Oh!’ he said.
‘Haven’t we met?’ Marion was speaking to me.
‘Yes, you have.’ I made myself known.
‘What brings you here?’ said Jake outright.
‘The same as brings you here. I was invited.’
Anne returned with the tea, served with a silver tea service and pretty china cups. She carried the tray while a young girl who was helping in the house followed with hot water and a plate of biscuits.
‘You speak English very well,’ Jake said.
‘Oh, we are English,’ said Anne. ‘But we live in France now. My husband inherited the château from his family on his mother’s side, the Martineaus.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Jake.
The factor came in from the farm and took a cup of tea standing up. He addressed Anne as ‘Madame’.
Anne was already regretting her impulse in asking the couple to tea. They said very little but just sat on. She was afraid they would miss the last bus to the station. Looking at me, she said, ‘The last bus goes at six, doesn’t it?’
I said to Marion, ‘You don’t want to miss the last bus.’
‘Could we see round the château?’ said Marion. ‘The guidebook says it’s fourteenth century.
‘Well, not all of it is,’ said Anne. ‘But today is a bit difficult. We don’t, you know, open the house to the public. We live in it.’
‘I’m sure we’ve met,’ said Marion to Anne, as if this took care of their catching the last bus — a point which was not lost on Anne. Kindly though she was I knew she hated to have to ferry people by car to the station and take on other chores she was not prepared for. I could see, already in Anne’s mind, the thought: ‘I have to get rid of these people or they’ll stay for dinner and then all night. They are château-grabbers.’
Anne had often lamented to me about the château-grabbers of her later life. People who didn’t want to know her when she was obscure and a bus driver’s wife now wanted to know her intimately. Monty didn’t care much about this, one way or another. But then the work of organizing meals and entertaining in style fell more on Anne than on Monty, who mostly spent his time helping the factor in the grounds, game-keeping and forest-clearing.
Anne could see that the English couple she had invited in ‘for a cup of tea’ were clingers, climbers, general nuisances, and she especially cast a look of desperation at me when Marion Ringer-Smith said, ‘I’m sure we’ve met.’
‘You think so?’ Anne said. She had got up and was leading the way to the back door. ‘This is the Cour des Adieus,’ she said; ‘it leads quicker to your bus stop.’ Marion stooped and took a cake as if it was her last chance of ever eating a cake again.
I was at this moment coming to the end of a novel I was writing. Anne had offered me the peace and quiet of French château life and the informality of her own life-style which made it an ideal arrangement. She had also undertaken to type out the novel from any handwritten manuscripts on to a word-processor. But now at a quarter to six, I could see the rest of our afternoon’s plans slipping away.
I doubted that Marion had indeed seen Anne before. It was by some mental process of transference that she had picked on Anne. The one she had actually met was myself, but she wasn’t very much aware of it. After a gap of forty years, she remembered very little of me.
Jake Ringer-Smith asked if he could use the bathroom. Oh, you bore, I thought. Why don’t you go? There are trees and thick bushes all the way down the drive for you to pee on. But no, he had to be shown the bathroom. It was nearly ten minutes to their bus time. Jake kicked his backpack over to his wife and said, ‘Take this, will you?’
‘I would really like to see round the château,’ Marion said, ‘while we’re here and since we’ve come all this way.
I had come across this situation before. There are people who will hold
up a party of tired and worn fellow travellers just because they have to see a pulpit. There are people who will arrive an hour late for dinner with the excuse that they had to see over some art gallery on the way. Marion was very much one of those. If challenged she would have thought nothing of pointing out that, after all, she had paid a plane fare to arrive at where she was. I remember Marion’s shapeless cheesecloth dress and her worn sandals and Jake’s baggy, ostentatiously patched, grubby trousers, their avidity to get on intimate terms with the lady of the house, to be invited to supper and, no doubt, to spend the night. I was really sorry for Anne who, I was aware, was sorry for herself and most of all regretting her own impulsive invitation to a cup of tea in her house.
Anne kept a soup kitchen in a building some way from the house, beyond a vegetable garden. She was pledged, I knew, to be there and help whenever possible, at six-thirty every evening. Laboriously, she explained this to the Ringer-Smiths. ‘… otherwise I’d have been glad to show you the house, not that there’s much to see.
‘Soup kitchen!’ said Jake. ‘May we join it for a bowl of soup? Then perhaps we can stretch out our sleeping-bag for the night under one of your charming archways and see the house tomorrow.
Does this sound like a nightmare? It was a nightmare. Nothing could throw off these people.
Down at the soup kitchen that evening, dispensing slabs of bread and cheese with bowls of tomato soup, I was not surprised to see the Ringer-Smiths appear.
‘We belong to the lower orders,’ he said to me with an exaggeratedly self-effacing grin that meant ‘We do not belong to any lower orders and just see how grand we really are — we don’t care what we look like or what company we keep. We are Us.’
In fact they looked positively shifty among the genuine skin-and-bone tramps and hairy drop-outs and bulging bag ladies. I dished out their portions to them without a smile. They had missed the last bus. Somehow, Anne and Monty had to arrange for them to have a bedroom for the night. ‘We stayed at the Château Leclaire de Martineau at Dijon’ I could hear them telling their friends.
Before breakfast I advised Anne and Monty to make themselves scarce. ‘Otherwise,’ I said, ‘you’ll never get rid of them. Leave them to me.