Memento Mori

MEMENTO MORI

Muriel Spark

What shall I do with this absurdity —

O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?

W .B. YEATS, The Tower

 

 

 

 

 

O what Venerable and Reverend Creatures

did the Aged seem! Immortal Cherubims!

THOMAS TRAHERNE, Centuries of Meditation

 

 

 

Q.   What are the four last things to be ever remembered?

A.   The four last things to be ever remembered are Death, Judgement, Hell, and Heaven.

The Penny Catechism

 

 

 

 

 

ONE

Dame Lettie Colston refilled her fountain-pen and continued her letter:

One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk & smog & get into the clear crystal.

The telephone rang. She lifted the receiver. As she had feared, the man spoke before she could say a word. When he had spoken the familiar sentence she said, ‘Who is that speaking, who is it?’

But the voice, as on eight previous occasions, had rung off. Dame Lettie telephoned to the Assistant Inspector as she had been requested to do. ‘It has occurred again,’ she said.

‘I see. Did you notice the time?’

‘It was only a moment ago.

‘The same thing?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the same. Surely you have some means of tracing —’

‘Yes, Dame Lettie, we will get him, of course.

A few moments later Dame Lettie telephoned to her brother Godfrey.

‘Godfrey, it has happened again.’

‘I’ll come and fetch you, Lettie,’ he said. ‘You must spend the night with us.’

‘Nonsense. There is no danger. It is merely a disturbance.’

‘What did he say?’

‘The same thing. And quite matter-of-fact, not really threatening. Of course the man’s mad. I don’t know what the police are thinking of, they must be sleeping. It’s been going on for six weeks now.

‘Just those words?’

‘Just the same words — Remember you must die — nothing more. ‘‘He must be a maniac,’ said Godfrey.

Godfrey’s wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology. Charmian was eighty-five. The other day a journalist from a weekly paper had been to see her. Godfrey had subsequently read aloud to her the young man’s article:

.    . . By the fire sat a frail old lady, a lady who once set the whole of the literary world (if not the Thames) on fire … Despite her age, this legendary figure is still abundantly alive …

Charmian felt herself dropping off, and so she said to the maid who was arranging the magazines on the long oak table by the window, ‘Taylor, I am dropping off to sleep for five minutes. Telephone to St Mark’s and say I am coming.’

Just at that moment Godfrey entered the room holding his hat and wearing his outdoor coat. ‘What’s that you say?’ he said.

‘Oh, Godfrey, you made me start.’

‘Taylor …’ he repeated, ‘St Mark’s … Don’t you realize there is no maid in this room, and furthermore, you are not in Venice?’

‘Come and get warm by the fire,’ she said, ‘and take your coat off’; for she thought he had just come in from the street.

‘I am about to go out,’ he said. ‘I am going to fetch Lettie who is to stop with us tonight. She has been troubled by another of those anonymous calls.’

‘That was a pleasant young man who called the other day,’ said Charmian.

‘Which young man?’

‘From the paper. The one who wrote —’

‘That was five years and two months ago,’ said Godfrey.

‘Why can’t one be kind to her?’ he asked himself as he drove to Lettie’s house in Hampstead. ‘Why can’t one be more gentle?’ He himself was eighty-seven, and in charge of all his faculties. Whenever he considered his own behaviour he thought of himself not as ‘I’ but as ‘one’.

‘One has one’s difficulties with Charmian,’ he told himself.

‘Nonsense,’ said Lettie. ‘I have no enemies.

‘Think,’ said Godfrey. ‘Think hard.’

‘The red lights,’ said Lettie. ‘And don’t talk to me as if I were Charmian.’

‘Lettie, if you please, I do not need to be told how to drive. I observed the lights.’ He had braked hard, and Dame Lettie was jerked forward.

She gave a meaningful sigh which, when the green lights came on, made him drive all the faster.

‘You know, Godfrey,’ she said, ‘you are wonderful for your age. ‘So everyone says.’ His driving pace became moderate; her sigh of relief was inaudible, her patting herself on the back, invisible.

‘In your position,’ he said, ‘you must have enemies.

‘Nonsense.’

‘I say yes.’ He accelerated.

‘Well, perhaps you’re right.’ He slowed down again, but Dame Lettie thought, I wish I hadn’t come.

They were at Knightsbridge. It was only a matter of keeping him happy till they reached Kensington Church Street and turned into Vicarage Gardens where Godfrey and Charmian lived.

‘I have written to Eric,’ she said, ‘about his book. Of course, he has something of his mother’s former brilliance, but it did seem to me that the subject-matter lacked the joy and hope which was the mark of a good novel in those days.’

‘I couldn’t read the book,’ said Godfrey. ‘I simply could not go on with it. A motor salesman in Leeds and his wife spending a night in a hotel with that communist librarian … Where does it all lead you?’

Eric was his son. Eric was fifty-six and had recently published his second novel.