The Complete Short Stories

by Muriel Spark

  On the way back to the hotel Lou chattered with relief that it was over. ‘Poor Elizabeth, she hasn’t had much of a chance. I liked little Francis, what did you think of little Francis, Ray?’

  Raymond did not like being called Ray, but he made no objection for he knew that Lou had been under a strain. Elizabeth had not been very pleasant. She had expressed admiration for Lou’s hat, bag, gloves and shoes which were all navy blue, but she had used an accusing tone. The house had been smelly and dirty. ‘I’ll show you round,’ Elizabeth had said in a tone of mock refinement, and they were forced to push through a dark narrow passage behind her skinny form till they came to the big room where the children slept. A row of old iron beds each with a tumble of dark blanket rugs, no sheets. Raymond was indignant at the sight and hoped that Lou was not feeling upset. He knew very well Elizabeth had a decent living income from a number of public sources, and was simply a slut, one of those who would not help themselves.

  ‘Ever thought of taking a job, Elizabeth?’ he had said, and immediately realized his stupidity. But Elizabeth took her advantage. ‘What d’you mean? I’m not going to leave my kids in no nursery. I’m not going to send them to no home. What kids need these days is a good home life and that’s what they get.’ And she added, ‘God’s eyes are not shut,’ in a tone which was meant for him, Raymond, to get at him for doing well in life.

  Raymond distributed half-crowns to the younger children and deposited on the table half-crowns for those who were out playing in the street.

  ‘Goin’ already?’ said Elizabeth in her tone of reproach. But she kept eyeing Henry with interest, and the reproachful tone was more or less a routine affair.

  ‘You from the States?’ Elizabeth said to Henry.

  Henry sat on the edge of his sticky chair and answered, no, from Jamaica, while Raymond winked at him to cheer him.

  ‘During the war there was a lot of boys like you from the States,’ Elizabeth said, giving him a sideways look.

  Henry held out his hand to the second youngest child, a girl of seven, and said, ‘Come talk to me.

  The child said nothing, only dipped into the box of sweets which Lou had brought.

  ‘Come talk,’ said Henry.

  Elizabeth laughed. ‘If she does talk you’ll be sorry you ever asked. She’s got a tongue in her head, that one. You should hear her cheeking up to the teachers.’ Elizabeth’s bones jerked with laughter among her loose clothes. There was a lopsided double bed in the corner, and beside it a table cluttered with mugs, tins, a comb and brush, a number of hair curlers, a framed photograph of the Sacred Heart, and also Raymond noticed what he thought erroneously to be a box of contraceptives. He decided to say nothing to Lou about this; he was quite sure she must have observed other things which he had not; possibly things of a more distressing nature.

  Lou’s chatter on the way back to the hotel had a touch of hysteria. ‘Raymond, dear,’ she said in her most chirpy West End voice, ‘I simply had to give the poor dear all my next week’s housekeeping money. We shall have to starve, darling, when we get home. That’s simply what we shall have to do.’

  ‘OK,’ said Raymond.

  ‘I ask you,’ Lou shrieked, ‘what else could I do, what could I do?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Raymond, ‘but what you’ve done.’

  ‘My own sister, my dear,’ said Lou; ‘and did you see the way she had her hair bleached? — All streaky, and she used to have a lovely head of hair.’

  ‘I wonder if she tries to raise herself?’ said Raymond. ‘With all those children she could surely get better accommodation if only she —’

  ‘That sort,’ said Henry, leaning forward from the back of the car, never moves. It’s the slum mentality, man. Take some folks I’ve seen back home —’

  ‘There’s no comparison,’ Lou snapped suddenly, ‘this is quite a different case.

  Raymond glanced at her in surprise; Henry sat back, offended. Lou was thinking wildly, what a cheek him talking like a snob. At least Elizabeth’s white.

  Their prayers for the return of faith to Henry Pierce were so far answered in that he took a tubercular turn which was followed by a religious one. He was sent off to a sanatorium in Wales with a promise from Lou and Raymond to visit him before Christmas. Meantime, they applied themselves to Our Lady for the restoration of Henry’s health.

  Oxford St John, whose love affair with the red-haired girl had come to grief, now frequented their flat, but he could never quite replace Henry in their affections. Oxford was older and less refined than Henry. He would stand in front of the glass in their kitchen and tell himself, ‘Man, you just a big black bugger.’ He kept referring to himself as black, which of course he was, Lou thought, but it was not the thing to say. He stood in the doorway with his arms and smile thrown wide: ‘I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.’ And once, when Raymond was out, Oxford brought the conversation round to that question of being black all over, which made Lou very uncomfortable and she kept looking at the clock and dropped stitches in her knitting.

  Three times a week when she went to the black Our Lady with her rosary to ask for the health of Henry Pierce, she asked also that Oxford St John would get another job in another town, for she did not like to make objections, telling her feelings to Raymond; there were no objections to make that you could put your finger on. She could not very well complain that Oxford was common; Raymond despised snobbery, and so did she, it was a very delicate question. She was amazed when, within three weeks, Oxford announced that he was thinking of looking for a job in Manchester.

  Lou said to Raymond, ‘Do you know, there’s something in what they say about the bog-oak statue in the church.’

  ‘There may be,’ said Raymond. ‘People say so.

  Lou could not tell him how she had petitioned the removal of Oxford St John. But when she got a letter from Henry Pierce to say he was improving, she told Raymond, ‘You see, we asked for Henry to get back the Faith, and so he did. Now we ask for his recovery and he’s improving.’

  ‘He’s having good treatment at the sanatorium,’ Raymond said. But he added, ‘Of course we’ll have to keep up the prayers.’ He himself; though not a rosary man, knelt before the Black Madonna every Saturday evening after Benediction to pray for Henry Pierce.

  Whenever they saw Oxford he was talking of leaving Whitney Clay. Raymond said, ‘He’s making a big mistake going to Manchester. A big place can be very lonely. I hope he’ll change his mind.’

  ‘He won’t,’ said Lou, so impressed was she now by the powers of the Black Madonna. She was good and tired of Oxford St John with his feet up on her cushions, and calling himself a nigger.

  ‘We’ll miss him,’ said Raymond, ‘he’s such a cheery big soul.’

  ‘We will,’ said Lou. She was reading the parish magazine, which she seldom did, although she was one of the voluntary workers who sent them out, addressing hundreds of wrappers every month. She had vaguely noticed, in previous numbers, various references to the Black Madonna, how she had granted this or that favour. Lou had heard that people sometimes came from neighbouring parishes to pray at the Church of the Sacred Heart because of the statue. Some said they came from all over England, but whether this was to admire the art-work or to pray, Lou was not sure. She gave her attention to the article in the parish magazine:

  While not wishing to make excessive claims … many prayers answered and requests granted to the Faithful in an exceptional way … two remarkable cures effected, but medical evidence is, of course, still in reserve, a certain lapse of time being necessary to ascertain permanency of cure. The first of these cases was a child of twelve suffering from leukaemia … The second … While not desiring to create a cultus where none is due, we must remember it is always our duty to honour Our Blessed Lady, the dispenser of all graces, to whom we owe …

  Another aspect of the information received by the Father Rector concerning our ‘Black Madonna’ is one pertaining to childless couples of which thre
e cases have come to his notice. In each case the couple claim to have offered constant devotion to the ‘Black Madonna’, and in two of the cases specific requests were made for the favour of a child. In all cases the prayers were answered. The proud parents … It should be the loving duty of every parishioner to make a special thanksgiving … The Father Rector will be grateful for any further information …

  ‘Look, Raymond,’ said Lou. ‘Read this.’

  They decided to put in for a baby to the Black Madonna.

  The following Saturday, when they drove to the church for Benediction Lou jangled her rosary. Raymond pulled up outside the church. ‘Look here, Lou,’ he said, ‘do you want a baby in any case?’ — for he partly thought she was only putting the Black Madonna to the test — ‘Do you want a child, after all these years?’

  This was a new thought to Lou. She considered her neat flat and tidy routine, the entertaining with her good coffee cups, the weekly papers and the library books, the tastes which they would not have been able to cultivate had they had a family of children. She thought of her nice young looks which everyone envied, and her freedom of movement.

  ‘Perhaps we should try,’ she said. ‘God won’t give us a child if we aren’t meant to have one.’

  ‘We have to make some decisions for ourselves,’ he said. ‘And to tell you the truth if you don’t want a child, I don’t.’

  ‘There’s no harm in praying for one,’ she said.

  ‘You have to be careful what you pray for,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t tempt Providence.’

  She thought of her relatives, and Raymond’s, all married with children. She thought of her sister Elizabeth with her eight, and remembered that one who cheeked up to the teachers, so pretty and sulky and shabby, and she remembered the fat baby Francis sucking his dummy and clutching Elizabeth’s bony neck.

  ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a baby,’ said Lou.

  Oxford St John departed at the end of the month. He promised to write, but they were not surprised when weeks passed and they had no word. ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever hear from him again,’ said Lou. Raymond thought he detected satisfaction in her voice, and would have thought she was getting snobbish as women do as they get older, losing sight of their ideals, had she not gone on to speak of Henry Pierce. Henry had written to say he was nearly cured, but had been advised to return to the West Indies.

  ‘We must go and see him,’ said Lou. ‘We promised. What about the Sunday after next?’

  ‘OK,’ said Raymond.

  It was the Saturday before that Sunday when Lou had her first sick turn. She struggled out of bed to attend Benediction, but had to leave suddenly during the service and was sick behind the church in the presbytery yard. Raymond took her home, though she protested against cutting out her rosary to the Black Madonna.

  ‘After only six weeks!’ she said, and she could hardly tell whether her sickness was due to excitement or nature. ‘Only six weeks ago,’ she said — and her voice had a touch of its old Liverpool — ‘did we go to that Black Madonna and the prayer’s answered, see.’

  Raymond looked at her in awe as he held the bowl for her sickness. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  She was well enough next day to go to visit Henry in the sanatorium. He was fatter and, she thought, a little coarser: and tough in his manner, as if once having been nearly disembodied he was not going to let it happen again. He was leaving the country very soon. He promised to come and see them before he left. Lou barely skimmed through his next letter before handing it over to Raymond.

  Their visitors, now, were ordinary white ones. ‘Not so colourful,’ Raymond said, ‘as Henry and Oxford were.’ Then he looked embarrassed lest he should seem to be making a joke about the word coloured.

  ‘Do you miss the niggers?’ said Tina Farrell, and Lou forgot to correct her.

  Lou gave up most of her church work in order to sew and knit for the baby. Raymond gave up the Reader’s Digest. He applied for promotion and got it; he became a departmental manager. The flat was now a waiting-room for next summer, after the baby was born, when they would put down the money for a house. They hoped for one of the new houses on a building site on the outskirts of the town.

  ‘We shall need a garden,’ Lou explained to her friends. ‘I’ll join the Mothers’ Union,’ she thought. Meantime the spare bedroom was turned into a nursery. Raymond made a cot, regardless that some of the neighbours complained of the hammering. Lou prepared a cradle, trimmed it with frills. She wrote to her relatives; she wrote to Elizabeth, sent her five pounds, and gave notice that there would be no further weekly payments, seeing that they would now need every penny.

  ‘She doesn’t require it, anyway,’ said Raymond. ‘The Welfare State looks after people like Elizabeth.’ And he told Lou about the contraceptives he thought he had seen on the table by the double bed. Lou became very excited about this. ‘How did you know they were contraceptives? What did they look like? Why didn’t you tell me before? What a cheek, calling herself a Catholic, do you think she has a man, then?’

  Raymond was sorry he had mentioned the subject.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear, don’t upset yourself, dear.’

  ‘And she told me she goes to Mass every Sunday, and all the kids go excepting James. No wonder he’s got into trouble with an example like that. I might have known, with her peroxide hair. A pound a week I’ve been sending up to now, that’s fifty-two pounds a year. I would never have done it, calling herself a Catholic with birth control by her bedside.’

  ‘Don’t upset yourself; dear.’

  Lou prayed to the Black Madonna three times a week for a safe delivery and a healthy child. She gave her story to the Father Rector who announced it in the next parish magazine. ‘Another case has come to light of the kindly favour of our “Black Madonna” towards a childless couple …’ Lou recited her rosary before the statue until it was difficult for her to kneel, and, when she stood, could not see her feet. The Mother of God with her black bog-oaken drapery, her high black cheekbones and square hands looked more virginal than ever to Lou as she stood counting her beads in front of her stomach.

  She said to Raymond, ‘If it’s a girl we must have Mary as one of the names. But not the first name, it’s too ordinary.

  ‘Please yourself, dear,’ said Raymond. The doctor had told him it might be a difficult birth.

  ‘Thomas, if it’s a boy,’ she said, ‘after my uncle. But if it’s a girl I’d like something fancy for a first name.’

  He thought, Lou’s slipping, she didn’t used to say that word, fancy.

  ‘What about Dawn?’ she said. ‘I like the sound of Dawn. Then Mary for a second name. Dawn Mary Parker, it sounds sweet.’

  ‘Dawn! That’s not a Christian name,’ he said. Then he told her, ‘Just as you please, dear.’

  ‘Or Thomas Parker,’ she said.

  She had decided to go into the maternity wing of the hospital like everyone else. But near the time she let Raymond change her mind, since he kept saying, ‘At your age, dear, it might be more difficult than for the younger women. Better book a private ward, we’ll manage the expense.

  In fact, it was a very easy birth, a girl. Raymond was allowed in to see Lou in the late afternoon. She was half asleep. ‘The nurse will take you to see the baby in the nursery ward,’ she told him. ‘She’s lovely, but terribly red.’

  ‘They’re always red at birth,’ said Raymond.

  He met the nurse in the corridor. ‘Any chance of seeing the baby? My wife said…’

  She looked flustered. ‘I’ll get the Sister,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to give any trouble, only my wife said —’

  ‘That’s all right. Wait here, Mr Parker.’

  The Sister appeared, a tall grave woman. Raymond thought her to be short-sighted for she seemed to look at him fairly closely before she bade him follow her.

  The baby was round and very red, with dark curly hair.

  ‘Fancy her having hair
. I thought they were born bald,’ said Raymond.

  ‘They sometimes have hair at birth,’ said the Sister.

  ‘She’s very red in colour.’ Raymond began comparing his child with those in the other cots. ‘Far more so than the others.’

  ‘Oh, that will wear off.’

  Next day he found Lou in a half-stupor. She had been given a strong sedative following an attack of screaming hysteria. He sat by her bed, bewildered. Presently a nurse beckoned him from the door. ‘Will you have a word with Matron?’

  ‘Your wife is upset about her baby,’ said the matron. ‘You see, the colour. She’s a beautiful baby, perfect. It’s a question of the colour.’

  ‘I noticed the baby was red,’ said Raymond, ‘but the nurse said —’

  ‘Oh, the red will go. It changes, you know. But the baby will certainly be brown, if not indeed black, as indeed we think she will be. A beautiful healthy child.’

  ‘Black?’ said Raymond.

  ‘Yes, indeed we think so, indeed I must say, certainly so,’ said the matron. ‘We did not expect your wife to take it so badly when we told her. We’ve had plenty of dark babies here, but most of the mothers expect it.’

  ‘There must be a mix-up. You must have mixed up the babies,’ said Raymond.

  ‘There’s no question of mix-up,’ said the matron sharply. ‘We’ll soon settle that. We’ve had some of that before.’

  ‘But neither of us are dark,’ said Raymond. ‘You’ve seen my wife. You see me —’That’s something you must work out for yourselves. I’d have a word with the doctor if I were you. But whatever conclusion you come to, please don’t upset your wife at this stage. She has already refused to feed the child, says it isn’t hers, which is ridiculous.’