Not to Disturb

by Muriel Spark

  II

  It is ten-thirty at night. Lister has changed his clothes and so has his young aunt, Eleanor. They walk hand-in-hand up the swirling great staircase with its filigree of Regency wrought-iron banisters, imported in their time as were so many other appointments of the house. Lister flicks on the light and opens the folding doors of the Klopstocks’ long drawing-room, allowing Eleanor to pass before him into the vastness with its curtains looped along the row of French windows. Outside is a balustrade and beyond that the night. The parquet glitters obliquely, not having been trodden on today. The blue and shrimp-pink of the carpet, the pinks and browns of the tapestried chairs, the little tables, the scrolled flat desk and the porcelain vases are spread around Lister and Eleanor, as they enter the room, like standing waiters on the arrival of the first guests at an official reception. A porcelain snow-white lamb, artfully woolly, sleeps peacefully on the mantelpiece where the Baron placed it eleven years ago when the house was built and his precious goods brought in. The Adam mantelpiece at one end of the room came through the Swiss customs along with the rest as did the twin mantelpiece in the ante-room at the other end. Eleanor, wearing a grey woollen dress and carrying a black bag, sits down gracefully on a wide, upholstered chair and leans her arms on a small table, toying with the pink-blond carnations she herself arranged freshly this morning.

  She looks about thirty-four. Her nephew, Lister, well advanced into his mid-forties He wears a dark business suit with a white shirt and a dull red tie. They could be anybody, and more conceivably could be the master and mistress of the house just returned at this time of night from a trip to a city — Paris or even Geneva — or just about to leave for an airport, a night flight. Eleanor’s hair is short, curled and dull. Lister’s gleams with dark life. Their faces are long and similar. Lister sits opposite Eleanor and looks at a part of the wall that is covered with miniature portraits. Many objects in this large room are on a miniature scale. There are no large pictures, such as would fit it. The Monet is one of the smaller scale, and so is the Goya. So too are a group of what appear to be family portraits, so that it seems as if the inclination towards the miniature is either a trait descending throughout a few generations to their present owner, or else these little portraits have been cleverly copied, more recently, from some more probable larger originals. Ornamental keys, enamelled snuff-boxes and bright coins stand by on the small tables.

  Lister looks away from the wall, and straight at Eleanor. ‘My dear,’ he says.

  She says, ‘I hear their voices.’

  ‘They are still alive,’ says Lister. ‘I’m sure of that. It hasn’t happened yet.’

  ‘It’s going to happen,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, my dear, it’s inevitable.’ He takes a cigarette from the long silver box and lights it with the table lighter. Then he raises a finger for silence, as if Eleanor had been making a noise, which she had not. ‘Listen!’ he says. ‘They’re arguing in high tone. Eleanor, you’re right!’

  Eleanor takes from her bag a long steel nail-file, gets up, goes to a corner of the carpet, raises it, kneels, then with the file dislodges a loose piece of parquet.

  ‘Softly and swiftly, my love.’

  She looks up. ‘Don’t be so smart. This isn’t the time to lark about.’ She bends to dislodge another, and moving backward a little, knee by knee, leans forward on her elbows and places her ear to the planks of dusty common wood beneath the parquet.

  ‘Eleanor, it isn’t worthy of you,’ he says. ‘You look like a parlour maid. A minute ago you didn’t.’

  She listens hard, looking upward through space to the high ceiling as if in a trance. Every little while a wave of indistinct voices from below reaches the drawing-room, one shrill, another shrill, then all together, excited. From a floor above, somebody bangs and the sound is repeated, with voices and a scuffle. Eleanor raises her head and says, exasperated, ‘With him in the attic barking again and banging, and you carrying on, it’s impossible to hear properly what’s being said below. Why didn’t Sister Barton give him his injection?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, leaning back with his cigarette. ‘I’m sure I advised her to. This parquet flooring once belonged to a foreign king. He had to flee his throne. He took the parquet of his palace with him, also the door-knobs. Royalty always do, when they have to leave. They take everything, like stage-companies who need their props. With royalty, of course, it all is largely a matter of stage production. And lighting. Royalty are very careful about their setting and their lighting. As is the Pope. The Baron resembled royalty and the Pope in that respect at least. Parquet flooring and door-handles. The Baron bought them all in a lot with the house when the old king passed away. They definitely came from the royal palace.’

  ‘All I heard from down there,’ says Eleanor, putting the oblongs of palace parquet back in place and rising, while she folds back the carpet over them, ‘was something like “You said . . .” — “No you did not. I said . . .” — “No, you did say . . .” — “When in hell did I say . . .” That means they’re going over it all, Lister. It could take all night.’

  ‘Heloise said it could be around six in the morning,’ Lister remarks as Eleanor stands flicking her skirt against the strange event that it has gathered fluff or dust. ‘Not,’ he says, ‘that I normally take any interest in Heloise’s words. But she’s in an interesting condition. They get good at guessing when they’re in that state.’

  Eleanor is back in her chair again. Down at the back door there is a noise loud enough to reach this quiet room. A banging. A demand. At the same time, at the front door the bell shrills.

  ‘I hope someone answers that door before the Baroness gets it in her head to go and answer it herself,’ says Eleanor. ‘Any break in the meeting might distract them from the quarrel and side-track the climax, wouldn’t you think?’

  ‘The Baron said not to disturb,’ says Lister, ‘as if to say, nobody leaves the room till we’ve had a clarification, let the tension mount as it may. And that’s final. She’ll never leave the library.’

  ‘Well, they must be getting hungry. They’ve had nothing to eat.’

  ‘Let them eat cake,’ says Lister, and he adds,

  ‘Think, in this battered Caravanserai

  Whose doorways are alternate Night and Day,

  How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp

  Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.’

  Eleanor says, ‘It’s true they’ve had some important visitors.’

  ‘The adjective “battered,”’ Lister says, looking round the quiet expanse of drawing-room, ‘I apply in the elastic sense. Also “caravanserai” I use loosely. The house is more like a Swiss hotel, which you may be sure it will become. But endless caravans, so to speak, have most certainly come and gone here, they have come, they have stopped over, they have gone. I’m fairly to the point. It will make a fine hotel. Put different furniture into it, and you have a hotel.’

  ‘Lister,’ she says, ‘you’re always so wonderful. There could never be anyone else in my life.’

  He says, rising to approach her, ‘Aunt to me though you are, would you marry me outside the Book of Common Prayer?’

  She says, ‘I have my scruples and I’m proud of them.’

  He says, ‘In France an aunt may marry a nephew.’

  ‘No, Lister, I stand by the Table of Kindred and Affinity. I don’t want to get heated at this moment, on this night, Lister. You’re starting me off. The press a
nd the police are coming, and there are only sixty-four shopping days to Christmas.’

  ‘I was only suggesting,’ he says. ‘I’m only giving you a little thought for when all this is over.’

  ‘It’s going too far. You have to keep your unreasonable demands within bounds. I’m old-fashioned beyond my years. One thought at a time is what I like.’

  ‘Let’s go down,’ says Lister, ‘and see what the servants are up to.’

  As they come down the staircase voices rebound from the library. Lister and Eleanor continue silently and, turning into the servants’ hall, Lister stops and looks at the library door. ‘What were they doing anyway, amongst us, on the crust of this tender earth?’ he says. ‘What were they doing here?’

  The other servants fall silent. ‘What are they doing here, anyway in this world?’

  Heloise, pink and white of skin, fresh from her little sleep, says, ‘Doing their own thing.’

  ‘They haven’t finished it yet,’ says Clovis. ‘I’m getting anxious. Listen to their voices.’

  ‘There must have been some good in them,’ Eleanor says. ‘They couldn’t have been all bad.’

  ‘Oh, I agree. They did wrong well. And they were good for a purpose so long as they lasted,’ Lister says. ‘As paper cups are suitable for occasions, you use them and throw them away. Who brought that fur coat in here?’ He points to a white mink coat draped over a chair.

  ‘It looks a dream on me,’ Heloise says. ‘It doesn’t meet at the front, but afterwards it will.’

  ‘You’d better put it back. Victor Passerat’s been seen in it,’ Lister says. ‘The police will inquire.’

  Heloise takes away the coat and says, as she goes, ‘I’ll get it in the end. Somehow I feel I’ll get it in the end.’

  ‘She might well be right,’ Lister says. ‘Her foresight runs high at this moment. Who were those people banging at the back door and ringing at the front?’

  ‘The girls in the car, demanding what’s happened to their friend, Passerat,’ Hadrian says. ‘I told them that he was with the Baron and Baroness and they were not to be disturbed. They said they had an appointment. One of them’s a masseuse that I haven’t seen before.’

  ‘And the other?’ says Lister.

  ‘The other didn’t say. I didn’t ask.’

  ‘You did right,’ Lister says. ‘They don’t come into the story.’

  Outside are the sounds of the lake-water lapping on the jetty and of the mountain-wind in the grandiose trees. The couple in the car are separated, one in the front, one in the back seat, each lolling under a rug. They seem to be sleeping but every now and then one of them moves, one of them speaks, and again their heads bend and the blankets move over their crouched uneasy shoulders. The lights from the house and from the distant drive touch on their movements.

  They both start upright as another car, dark and large, pulls up. A lithe, leather-coated young man sprints out and approaches the couple. They are scrambling out of their car now.

  ‘We can’t get in the house,’ says the one from the front seat. ‘They won’t open the door, even. We’ve been here over three hours, waiting for our friend.’

  ‘What friend? What do you want?’ says the lithe young man, impatiently jangling a bunch of keys. ‘I’m the secretary, Mr Samuel. Tell me what you want.’

  The other friend of Victor Passerat replies, ‘Victor Passerat. We’re waiting for him. It’s serious. He had an appointment with the Baroness and with the Baron, and — ’

  ‘Just a minute,’ says Mr Samuel, looking closely at the second friend, ‘just a minute. You sound like a man.’

  ‘I am a man.’

  ‘All right. I thought you were a girl.’

  ‘That’s only my clothes. My friend here’s a woman. I’m Alex — she’s a masseuse.’

  ‘My name’s Anne,’ states the masseuse, stockily regarding Mr Samuel’s bunch of keys. ‘Do you have the keys to the house?’

  ‘I certainly do,’ says Mr Samuel.

  ‘Well, we want to know what’s going on,’ says the woman.

  ‘We’re worried, quite frankly,’ says her young friend.

  Mr Samuel places a gentle hand on the shoulders of each. ‘Don’t you think,’ he says, ‘that it would be more advisable for you to go away and let nature take its course? Go away, quietly and without fuss; just go away and play the piano, or something. Take a soothing nightcap, both of you, and forget about Passerat.’

  From an upper room comes a sound like a human bark followed by an owl-screech.

  Anne the masseuse adds a further cry to the night. ‘Open that door,’ she screams and running to the back door beats her heavy shoulder against it, banging with her fists as well.

  Mr Samuel winds his way to her with pleasant-mannered authority. ‘That was only the invalid,’ he says. ‘The nurse has probably bitten his finger again. You would do the same, I’m sure, if one of your patients attempted to place his hand over your mouth for some reason.’

  Anne’s friend, Alex, calls out, ‘Come on back in the car, Anne. It might be dangerous.’

  Mr Samuel is touching her elbow, urging her back to their small car. ‘There’s nothing in it for you,’ he is saying. ‘Go home and forget it.’

  The masseuse is large but she appears to have very little moral resistance. She starts to cry, with huge baby-sobs, while her companion, Alex, his square bony face framed in a silk head-scarf and his eyes pleadingly laden with make-up under finely shaped eyebrows, puts out a bony hand to touch her face. ‘Come back in the car, Anne,’ he says, giving Mr Samuel a look of hurt umbrage.

  Anne turns on Mr Samuel. ‘Who made you the secretary?’ she says. ‘Victor Passerat has been secretary since June.’

  ‘Please,’ says Mr Samuel. ‘I didn’t say he wasn’t secretary. I only say I’m the secretary in residence. There are I don’t know how many secretaries. Victor is only one of the many and it’s only just unfortunate that this appointment between him and the Baron Klopstocks should keep you hanging around outside the house on a cold night. Just go home. Put on a record.’

  ‘Is everything going to be all right?’ Anne says. Alex has got into the car waiting for her. Anne gets in and puts her hands on the wheel without certainty. She looks at Alex as if for guidance. Meanwhile Mr Samuel has flicked himself in a graceful and preoccupied way to the back door of the house and now selects a key.

  The couple in the car stare after him and he gives them one more glance; he lets himself in and quietly closes the door upon them. They drive off, then, up the long avenue, round the winding drive, past the lawns which in summer lie luminously green and spread on the one hand towards the swimming-pool in its very blue basin, and on the other towards the lily-pond, the animal-shaped yews, the fountains and the sunken rose garden. Behind them, and beyond the darkness, twinkles the back of the house — a few slits of light peppering its whole length — and behind that again, in the further darkness, the sloping terraces leading to the Lake of Geneva where the boats are moored and the water stretches across to the mountain shore. The little dark green car, leaving it all behind, reaches the lodge. Anne sounds the horn. Theo, wrapped up, now, in a heavy coat, stands evidently forewarned; he unlocks the gate and swings it wide.

  When they have reached the main road and are off, he goes indoors; there he writes down the number of their car on a scribbling block which he has set out ready in the hall.

  His wife stands by in her cord-trimmed dressing-gown
. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know, Clara. But seeing I’ve been told to expect an all-night spell of duty without any relief-man, I’ve been taking a note of all numbers. I don’t know, Clara, I really don’t know why.’ He tears off the sheet and crumples it, tossing it on the sitting-room fire.

  ‘What’s wrong with the relief-men tonight?’ Clara says. ‘Where’s Conrad, where’s Bernard, where’s Jean-Albert, where’s Stephen? Why don’t they send Pablo, what’s he doing with them up there at the house? My sleep is terrible, how can I sleep?’

  ‘I’m a simple man,’ says Theo, ‘and your dreams give me the jitters, but setting all that aside I smell a crisis. The Baroness hasn’t been playing the game, and that’s about it. Why did she let herself go to rack and ruin? They say she was a fine-looking woman a year ago. Lovely specimen.’

  ‘She used to keep her hair frosted or blond-streaked,’ Clara whispers. ‘She shouldn’t have let go her shape. Why did she suddenly start to go natural? She must have started to be sincere with someone.’

  ‘Don’t be frightened, Clara. Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘It’s true what I say, Theo. She changed all of a sudden. I showed you her in the magazines in her ski-outfit. Wasn’t she magnificent?’

  ‘Go to bed, Clara. I say, go up to bed, dear.’

  ‘Can’t I have the wireless on for company?’

  ‘All right. Keep it low. We aren’t supposed to be here to enjoy ourselves, you know.’

  Theo steps forth from his doorway as another car approaches the gate, flicking its large headlights.

  The chauffeur puts his head out while Theo opens the gate, but Theo speaks first, apparently recognizing the occupant of the back seat.

  ‘His Excellency, Prince Eugene,’ Theo says, respectfully.

  The chauffeur’s mouth smiles a little, his eyes drooping, perhaps with boredom, perhaps with tiredness.

  ‘I’m pretty sure they’re not at home. Were they expecting his Excellency?’ Theo says.