by Muriel Spark
I can honestly say that Willy’s place was the most unhygienic place I have seen in my life. He said I had an unusual type of beauty, which he must capture. This was when we came back to his place from the restaurant. The light was very dim, but I could see the bed had not been made, and the sheets were far from clean. He said he must paint me, but I told Mavis I did not like to go back there. ‘Don’t you like Willy?’ she asked. I could not deny that I liked Willy, in a way. There was something about him, I will say that. Mavis said, ‘I hope he hasn’t been making a pass at you, Lorna.’ I said he had not done so, which was almost true, because he did not attempt to go to the full extent. It was always unhygienic when I went to Willy’s place, and I told him so once, but he said, ‘Lorna, you are a joy.’ He had a nice way, and he took me out in his car, which was a good one, but dirty inside, like his place. Jim said one day, ‘He has pots of money, Lorna,’ and Mavis said, ‘You might make a man of him, as he is keen on you.’ They always said Willy came from a good family.
But I saw that one could not do anything with him. He would not change his shirt very often, or get clothes, but he went round like a tramp, lending people money, as I have seen with my own eyes. His place was in a terrible mess, with the empty bottles, and laundry in the corner. He gave me several gifts over the period, which I took as he would have only given them away, but he never tried to go to the full extent. He never painted my portrait, as he was painting fruit on a table all that time, and they said his pictures were marvellous, and thought Willy and I were getting married.
One night, when I went home, I was upset as usual, after Willy’s place. Mum and Dad had gone to bed, and I looked round our kitchen which is done in primrose and white. Then I went into the living-room, where Dad has done one wall in a patterned paper, deep rose and white, and the other walls pale rose, with white woodwork. The suite is new, and Mum keeps everything beautiful. So it came to me, all of a sudden, what a fool I was, going with Willy. I agree to equality, but as to me marrying Willy, as I said to Mavis, when I recall his place, and the good carpet gone greasy, not to mention the paint oozing out of the tubes, I think it would break my heart to sink so low.
Quest for Lavishes Ghast
Lavishes ghast! — this phrase haunted me for years. When I first came to London I worked for a man who was always losing his papers. Hours I would spend, looking for those bits of paper, until suddenly he would say, ‘Lavishes ghast.’ After a while I got used to this man. Northerner though I was, and with only the short ‘a’ of lavishes and the long ‘a’ of ghast to work on, I came to understand that lavishes ghast stood for ‘I have it at last.’ And in spite of his habit of talking hand-over-fist and disdaining consonants, it became possible for me to decode an irrelevant statement like ‘Clot on the brain’ into the relevant ‘Lost it again!’
I have kept coming across people like him. As a rule I have managed to fill in the missing letters and guess the whole. As a rule; but lavishes ghast remains an exception. In the same way that the yellowhammer chirps continually, ‘A little piece of bread and no cheese,’ and the cuckoo croaks nothing but ‘cuckoo,’ so, I swear, does everyone at the usual crowded party say ‘lavishes ghast’ all the time.
At the beginning of my quest I was quite unnerved by it. The phrase meant something different each time, but plainly it stemmed from a general, perhaps mystical meaning. Lavishes was so substantial and ghast so evanescent; all the anxious ingredients of Pavlov’s nasty practical jokes were there in essence. Were people talking of radishes vast? Did they hang from the mast? Once I met a soldier in the train who was trying to dodge the military police. ‘They’ll ask me to lavishes ghast and I lavishes ghast, can’t be done,’ he explained through his teeth. With due cunning I inquired, ‘Why not?’ The question goaded him to articulate speech. ‘How,’ he demanded, ‘can I hand ‘em me pass if I haven’t a pass?’ And a girl I knew told me, ‘I lavishes ghast to marry him.’ Ungenerously, I took this to mean she hadn’t been asked, but it turned out she hadn’t the heart. I recall, too, a visit to the country… a rabbit in the grass… ‘Yes, he does look happy at his task,’ I said to my host, who had seemed to point at a ploughman as he spoke.
There was also the earlier and more deranging occasion when I stayed overnight with a friend’s mother. At breakfast she was reading a letter from her son. She put down the letter, and, gazing wistfully at a bowl of flowers, murmured, ‘Lavishes ghast, don’t you think?’ Well, of course I thought Anthony was fast. I could have told her a lot about Anthony, but after all, she was the mother, so I said, ‘Oh, not really!’ She paused, and, keeping her eye still on the flowers, repeated firmly, ‘Well, my dear, I think they are ravishing flaahers.’
I entered the obsessional phase. L. G. became meaningful, threatening. I began to suspect that it was a person. I didn’t want to meet Mrs Ghast, for at the time I decided it must be a woman, a widow, formerly married to a Mr Ghast who was seen only once with his wife, on a desolate cliff top in the Orkneys or Land’s End, before he disappeared. Mrs Ghast would be very lavish at first. She would be ever so hospitable, to start with. At times I speculated whether Ghast might be a thing, a powerful magnetic mineral to which I alone was allergic. But pondering the question at the dead of night, I felt sure again it was a person.
The situation had reached Gothic proportions. I decided to pursue the monster, hunt it down before it hunted me, and thus I came to do so. I took to frequenting the sort of place which is not my sort of place at all: cosy tea shops in Hampstead, Kensington, and even Ealing, with names like Araminta’s Kettle or The Ginger Jug. Here, in these Jugs and Kettles, lavishes ghast flourishes most. And it rages most between the afternoon hours of four and five-thirty. My plan was simple: all I had to do was sit and listen, take notes of everything I heard by way of lavishes, do it into English and, when my collection reached a decent size, extract the common factors of sense. In this way I would locate lavishes ghast, its origin, nature, nationality of parents and present address.
The first afternoon, this seemed easy. I fixed on a mother and daughter having tea. ‘They’re very lavish here,’ said the mother, beaming on the cakes as the daughter replied, ‘But the tea’s ghastly.’ I took this to be a good omen. But within a few days sinister complications like ‘lavishes ghast lavishes’ began to set in. A creature comprising Alex’s car, aspects of art, anarchist bard, amorous chars, hand on my heart, Battersea Park, masses of stars, passion aha! remained beyond my comprehension.
My last tea shop was ominously called The African Palm by virtue of a large tough fern in the window. I chose a table next to a young couple who were conversing audibly.
‘What was the lavishes ghast on lavishes ghast like?’ rattled the girl.
‘No, thanks,’ said the youth, ‘I’ll have a bun.’
The girl looked cross. He had obviously misunderstood her, had this likable young man. She repeated her question. Practice had given me a flair for rapid decoding: ‘What was the Charity Dance on Saturday last like?’
‘Ghast!’ he replied. ‘Lavishes!’
‘I only went to please my mother,’ he added obligingly, from which I deduced that the dance had been ghastly and shattering. I now craned eagerly. The girl gave utterance again … She meant, surely, ‘Harriet’s mannerly ma’s having a bath at last.’ No doubt Harriet’s ma lived in a boarding-house where there was so little hot water, and she so mannerly, that she had always sacrificed her bath to the other residents.
But the young man was apparently a little deaf. The girl had to repeat her piece of information over and over. The arrogant heart of the guard carried him far too far … Tragic that happy young Mark fancies his chance at art … If the tea shop had been an opium den the nightmare quality of the afternoon could not have been improved upon. ‘Lavishes lavishes ghast lavishes ghast ghast,’ the girl insisted. I really believed I had it then: ‘Sad that a man like Papa had to depart fast.’ This was obviously connected with the charity dance. An emerald bracelet had been
missed. Papa, who was present, was also, later, missed. I could see Papa, small and round, skipping on to the plane — no, the Golden Arrow at Victoria Station. Papa, feeling for the bulge in his breast pocket, dressed so businesslike, but emanating such a sublime… Ma was prostrate. His firm were already going into the accounts. Sad that a man like Papa…
But who was Lavishes Ghast? Could it be that Papa…
At that moment someone entered the shop. The girl at the table looked up. Pamela!’ she called out. ‘Halo, Pamela,’ said the young man, we were just talking about you.’ Well, it had all been about Pamela and, for all I knew, her angular charms. As it happened I knew this Pamela. She came and spoke to me, then introduced me to her friends, and we stuck together for the evening.
We went to a pub and then to another. Then we went to a pub that served those watery meals comprising something with two vegetables, and decided we were hungry enough to take it. Two men sat at the table nearest ours. As the larger man ordered a rum with his supper, I noticed his voice above the hubbub from the bar, oiled and purring, like a cat of Rolls Royce make. He wore a broad ring studded with onyx, and although his clothes were dark, he looked profuse, his face, fruitlike above the white leaves of his collar, glowing with higher and richer thoughts. He said nothing to his companion who, poor thing, seemed distressed; this man, nervous and haggard, made repeated movements with his throat, as though swallowing down some dreadful sorrow.
The landlord approached the pair. ‘How’s business?’ he said with a more-than-hearty laugh. The large man seemed delighted by the question. ‘Lavishes ghast!’ he proclaimed with a deep ripple of wheel-borne laughter. His friend closed his eyelids and softly ordered a beer.
The waitress came along with our plates splashing over each other. She set them down and said, jerking her head to indicate the two men, ‘Did you hear that? I don’t call that a joke. Very bad taste.’ She explained that the men worked in the funeral parlour around the corner, and that it was the landlord’s indelicate habit to inquire how business was, and the big fellow’s habit to reply, ‘Absolutely marvellous.’
Suddenly I saw the whole thing quite clearly and the weight lifted for ever: this was Mr Lavishes and that was the unfortunate Mr Ghast. My friends were smiling at the landlord’s joke, and I, secure in my private enlightenment, smiled too, and continued to work out the simple details. The partners had begun as Lavishes, Ghast & Co., now known generally as Lavishes Ghast, Undertakers. Mr Lavishes preferred to deal with the bereaved relatives, leaving Mr Ghast to see to the actual body.
Lavishes Ghast. I like to think of Mr Lavishes and Mr Ghast performing, each in his own way, their selfless functions, so necessary to all. I feel it is rather touching, and only right, that when we gather together at parties we should pass those hours, as we do, in fervent acclamation of the Lavishes Ghast combine. In their way they are as much the backbone of the country as is the Housewife or the Coldstream Guard. And it is a memory to be cherished, that evening at the pub, when they settled to their late-snatched supper, in a silence of mutual understanding, interrupted only when shrunken Mr Ghast looked up from his plate, and having brokenly uttered the national phrase to which he had contributed his name, swallowed a mouthful of cabbage, alas.
The Young Man Who Discovered the Secret of Life
The main fact was, he was haunted by a ghost about five feet high when unfurled and standing upright. For the ghost unfurled itself from the top drawer of a piece of furniture that stood in the young man’s bed-sitting room every night, or failing that, every morning. The young man was a plasterer’s apprentice, or so he claimed.
But I have been told on good authority that this is absolutely absurd. There is no such thing: plasterers do not have apprentices. Ben, as the young man was called, was very concerned when I wrote to point this out. He decidedly preferred to change his status to that of ‘bricklayer’s’ or, better still, ‘kerblayer’s apprentice’, even though this meant putting himself in an unemployed category while doing a bit of plastering on the side to make a weekly wage of sorts.
I myself had only heard of Ben through correspondence, for he had written to me a most unusual letter, care of my publisher. In it, the then ‘plasterer’s apprentice’ told about the visitations of the ghost. Normally, I would have torn up the letter; I only replied to him because one of his statements contained the challenging one that through his ghost Ben had discovered, or was by way of discovering ‘the secret of life’. In my reply I was cautious about the ‘apparition’, as I called his ghost, but I more definitely pointed out that ‘the secret of life’ was most likely to mean the secret of his own personal life, not life in general. The lives of people hold many secrets, I emphasized. There was possibly no one ‘secret’ applying to us all. So, anyway, I wished him luck, and mailed off the letter. Goodbye.
But no, it wasn’t goodbye, as I might have foreseen. It was true that I didn’t write to him for some time, but he continued to write letters to me in some inexplicable need that he felt to express his odd experiences, real or imagined as the case might be.
According to Ben’s letters to me, his greatest problem with the ghost was now blackmail and jealousy, for the ghost was truly jealous of Ben’s girlfriend.
‘I can haunt whoever and wherever I wish,’ the ghost told Ben. ‘It is easy for me to inform the whole of your acquaintance that you are only a plasterer looking for a steady job, and as for being a kerblayer or even a bricklayer, that is far from the truth.’
‘Please yourself who you haunt,’ said Ben. ‘I am totally indifferent. The fact remains that I am a kerblayer at heart, whatever the nature of the temporary job as plasterer, etc., etc., that I am economically forced to accept from time to time.
‘And what is “etc., etc.”?’ said the ghost nastily. ‘Do you mind explaining?’
‘Curl up and return to your drawer,’ Ben bade him. ‘And mind you don’t crush my pyjamas.’
‘Your pyjamas,’ said the ghost, ‘have no place in the top drawer where I come from. They are not pure silk, they are Marks & Spencer’s.’
Ben was secretly very anxious lest it should be known he was not a kerblayer after all. But he was a brave fellow. ‘Get back to your place or else,’ he said.
The ghost curled up again, murmuring, ‘At least you admit that I have a right to be here. As it happens I know what is going to win the three-thirty tomorrow. It is Bartender’s Best.’
True enough that horse won the race and Ben was furious with himself for failing to take the tip, for he liked to play the horses when he had some money.
‘Any more tips?’ he asked the ghost that night.
‘I thought you would ask that question,’ said the ghost. ‘But as you know, your girlfriend doesn’t like betting. If you give her up I’ll tell no one your secret and I’ll give you good racing tips.
‘Do you know what?’ said Ben. ‘You are getting on my nerves. You are the result of stale air, neither more nor less. Stale air becomes radioactive. It becomes luminous. If I open the window you will gradually disappear.
‘Not me,’ said the ghost. ‘Not me, I won’t.’
‘I can’t think of any more mindless occupation than to be a ghost in that post-mortem way you have in coming and going. So very unnecessary. I could have you psychoanalysed away.’
Enter the story Genevieve, young and fair, a designer of scarecrows, Ben’s girlfriend: Ben was convinced that her occupational status, the only type of status that apparently he knew, was beneath his, particularly now that he had become ‘Profession: kerblayer’s apprentice’. The passion with which the ghost despised Genevieve could only be matched by Ben’s genuine and desperate love for her. In the meantime the ghost continued to unfurl its five feet and to give Ben advice like ‘psychoanalyse your crazy pavements.
‘The ghost is a terrible snob,’ Ben wrote. ‘He makes me feel great and terrible —’
In fact, Ben changed his patronizing attitude towards the girl only after Genevieve borrowed hi
s sun-hat, his jeans and one of his shirts to make up one of her scarecrows. She painted a turnip in the likeness of Ben’s face. When she had set up this scarecrow in a field everyone knew that it was modelled on Ben. Everyone smiled. The terrible snob ghost came to report this to Ben, adding that a cow’s milk had already been turned by the scarecrow.
On the previous day Ben had won twenty-four pounds on a horse, quite on his own hunch. So he skipped his usual visit to the job centre and took a bus out of town to the field where Genevieve’s handiwork was flapping. Two cars had drawn up by the side of the road, and the occupants were admiring the work of art, as one of them called it. ‘It’s the image of a young builder’s mate who once worked on my property,’ she said.
So instead of taking the effigy amiss Ben was full of admiration for Genevieve. He rang her up and made her fix a date for their marriage, never mind that he was at present out of work.
The ghost unfurled himself again that night, but when he heard of Ben’s proposal to Genevieve, he returned to the top drawer from whence he came, curled up and disappeared. ‘This quenching of the ghost,’ Ben wrote, ‘is to me the secret of life.’ He said ‘quenching’ for he felt the ghost had been thirsty for his soul, and had in fact drunk his fill.
Ben never again won on the horses, although he became a master-bricklayer, a prosperous man, specializing in crazy-paving.
Daisy Overend
It is hardly ever that I think of her, but sometimes, if I happen to pass Clarges Street or Albemarle Street on a sunny afternoon, she comes to mind. Or if, in a little crowd waiting to cross the road, I hear behind me two women meet, and the one exclaim:
‘Darling!’ (or ‘Bobbie!’ or ‘Goo!’) and the other answer: ‘Goo!’ (or ‘Billie!’ or ‘Bobbie!’ or ‘Darling!’) — if I hear these words, spoken in a certain trill which betokens the period 1920—29, I know that I have by chance entered the world of Daisy Overend, Bruton Street, W1.