The Comforters

THE

COMFORTERS

Muriel Spark

PART ONE

ONE

On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother’s voice below.

‘I’ll have a large wholemeal. I’ve got my grandson stopping for a week, who’s on the B.B.C. That’s my daughter’s boy, Lady Manders. He won’t eat white bread, one of his fads.’

Laurence shouted from the window, ‘Grandmother, I adore white bread and I have no fads.’

She puckered and beamed up at him.

‘Shouting from the window,’ she said to the baker.

‘You woke me up,’ Laurence said.

‘My grandson,’ she told the baker. ‘A large wholemeal, and don’t forget to call on Wednesday.’

Laurence looked at himself in the glass. ‘I must get up,’ he said, getting back into bed. He gave himself seven minutes.

He followed his grandmother’s movements from the sounds which came clearly through the worn cottage floorboards. At seventy-eight Louisa Jepp did everything very slowly but with extreme attention, as some do when they know they are slightly drunk. Laurence heard a clink and a pause, a tinkle and a pause, breakfast being laid. Her footsteps clicked like a clock that is running down as she moved between the scullery and the little hot kitchen; she refused to shuffle.

When he was half dressed Laurence opened a tiny drawer on the top of the tall old-fashioned chest. It contained some of his grandmother’s things, for she had given him her room. He counted three hairpins, eight mothballs; he found a small piece of black velvet embroidered with jet beads now loose on their thread. He reckoned the bit of stuff would be about two and a half inches by one and a half. In another drawer he found a comb with some of his grandmother’s hair on it and noted that the object was none too neat. He got some pleasure from having met with these facts, three hairpins, eight mothballs, a comb none too neat, the property of his grandmother, here in her home in Sussex, now in the present tense. That is what Laurence was like.

‘It is unhealthy,’ his mother had lately told him. ‘It’s the only unhealthy thing about your mind, the way you notice absurd details, it’s absurd of you.’

‘That’s what I’m like,’ Laurence said.

As usual, she knew this meant deadlock, but carried on, ‘Well, it’s unnatural. Because sometimes you see things that you shouldn’t.’

‘Such as?’

She did not say, but she knew he had been in her room prying into her messy make-up drawer, patting the little bottles like a cat and naming them. She could never persuade him that this was wrong. After all, it was a violation of privacy.

Very often Laurence said, ‘It would be wrong for you but it isn’t for me.’

And always Helena Manders, his mother, would reply ‘I don’t see that’, or ‘I don’t agree’, although really she did in a way.

In his childhood he had terrorized the household with his sheer literal truths.

‘Uncle Ernest uses ladies’ skin food, he rubs it on his elbows every night to keep them soft’ … ‘Eileen has got her pain’ … ‘Georgina Hogg has three hairs on her chin when she doesn’t pull them out. Georgina has had a letter from her cousin which I read.’

These were memorable utterances. Other items which he aired in the same breath, such as, ‘There’s been a cobweb on the third landing for two weeks, four days and fifteen hours, not including the time for the making’ — these were received with delight or indifference according to mood, and forgotten.

His mother told him repeatedly, ‘I’ve told you repeatedly, you are not to enter the maids’ rooms. After all, they are entitled to their privacy.’

As he grew older he learned to conceal the sensational portions of his knowledge, imparting only what was necessary to promote his reputation for being remarkably observant. In those days his father was capable of saying, on the strength of a school report, ‘I always knew Laurence would outgrow that morbid phase.’

‘Let’s hope he has,’ Helena Manders had said. Parents change. In those days, Laurence was aware that she half-suspected him of practising some vague sexual perversion which she could not name, would not envisage, and which in any case he did not practise. Then, it was almost to put her at ease, to assure her that he was the same Laurence as of old, that he said, during the holidays of his last term, ‘Eileen is going to have a baby.’

‘She’s a good Catholic girl,’ Helena protested; she was herself a Catholic since her marriage. None the less, on challenging Eileen in the kitchen, the case turned out to be so. Eileen, moreover, defiantly refused to name the man. Laurence was able to provide this information.

‘I’ve always kept up with Eileen’s correspondence,’ he explained. ‘It enlivens the school holidays.’

‘You’ve been in that poor girl’s room, reading her letters behind her back, the poor thing!’

‘Shall I tell you what her boy friend wrote?’ Laurence said tyrannously.

‘I’m shocked as you know,’ she said, accepting that this made no impression. ‘How you, a good Catholic — but apart from that, it’s illegal, I believe, to read letters addressed to others,’ she said, defeated.

Merely to give her the last word he pointed out, ‘Well, you’ve got them married, my dear. A good Catholic marriage. That’s the happy result of my shocking perusal of Eileen’s letters.’

‘The end doesn’t justify the means.’

Pat it came out just as he had expected. An answer for everything. All the same, incidents like this helped to deaden the blow when she realized that Laurence was abandoning, and finally had abandoned religion.

Louisa Jepp sat at the table writing out her football pools as she waited for Laurence.

‘Come down!’ she said to the ceiling, ‘and leave off your snooping, dear.’

As soon as he appeared she told him, ‘If Manchester City had won last week I should have got thirty thousand.’

Louisa folded her football coupon and placed it under the clock. She gave all her attention to Laurence and his breakfast.

She was half-gipsy, the dark one and the youngest of a large red-haired family, which at the time of her birth owed its prosperity to the father’s success as a corn dealer. The success was owing to good fortune in the first place, his having broken jail while waiting to come before the Bench, never afterwards returning to his gipsy tribe. It was a hundred and thirty years after this event that Louisa was sitting down to breakfast with Laurence.

Louisa’s hair remains black, though there is not much of it. She is short, and seen from the side especially, her form resembles a neat double potato just turned up from the soil with its small round head, its body from which hang the roots, her two thin legs below her full brown skirt and corpulence. Her face, from the front, is square, receding in planes like a prism. The main lines on her face are deep, they must have been in gradual evidence since she was thirty, they seemed carved to the bone. But the little wrinkles are superficial, brushing the surface of her skin, coming and going like innumerable stars when she puckers a smile or unfolds a look of surprise. Her eyes are deep-set and black. Her hands and feet very small. She wears rimless spectacles. She is still alive, not much changed from that day when Laurence came down to breakfast. She was wearing a brown dress, a brown woollen jacket with gilt buttons, and a pair of diamond earrings embedded in her ears.

When Laurence had sized her up, as he always did with everyone, he dipped his fork into a jar and drew out something long, white and pickled.

‘What can this be?’

‘Chid’lings,’ she said. ‘They are beautiful.’

He was accustomed to Louisa’s food: whelks, periwinkles, milts and roes, chitterlings and sweetbreads, giblets, brains and the tripes of ruminating animals. Louisa prepared them at long ease, by many processes of affusion, diffusion and immersion, requiring many pans of brine, many purifications and simmerings, much sousing and sweetening by slow degrees. She seldom bought an ordinary cut or joint, and held that people who went through life ignoring the inward vitals of shells and beasts didn’t know what was good for them.

‘If you won thirty thousand in the pool, what would you do?’ Laurence said.

‘Buy a boat,’ she replied.

‘I would paddle you up and down the river,’ Laurence said. ‘A houseboat would be nice. Do you remember that fortnight on the houseboat, my first year at prep school?’

‘I mean a boat for crossing the sea. Yes, it was lovely on the houseboat.’

‘A yacht? Oh, how grand.’

‘Well, a good-sized boat,’ said Louisa, ‘that’s what I’d buy. Suitable for crossing the Channel.’

‘A motor cruiser,’ Laurence suggested.

‘That’s about it,’ she said.

‘Oh, how grand.’

She did not reply, for he had gone too far with his ‘Oh, how grand!’

‘We could do the Mediterranean,’ he said.

‘Oh, how grand,’ she said.

‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to buy a house?’ Laurence had just remembered his mother’s plea, ‘If you get an opportunity do try to persuade her to take a little money from us and live comfortably in her own house.’

She answered, ‘No. But if I won a smaller sum I’d buy this cottage. I’m sure Mr Webster would sell.’

‘Oh, I’d love to think of you having the cottage for your very own. Smugglers Retreat is such a dear little house.’ Even as he spoke Laurence knew that phrases like ‘your very own’ and ‘dear little house’ betrayed what he was leading up to, they were not his grandmother’s style.

‘I know what you’re leading up to,’ said Louisa. ‘Help yourself to the cigarettes.’

‘I have my own. Why won’t you let father buy the cottage for you? He can afford it.’

‘I manage very nicely,’ said Louisa. ‘Smoke one of these — they come from Bulgaria.’

‘Oh, how grand!’ But he added, ‘How extremely smart and where did you get them from?’

‘Bulgaria. I think through Tangiers.’

Laurence examined the cigarette. His grandmother, a perpetual surprise. She rented the cottage, lived as an old-age pensioner.

Her daughter Helena said frequently, ‘God knows how she manages. But she always seems to have plenty of everything.’

Helena would tell her friends, ‘My mother won’t accept a penny. Most independent; the Protestant virtues, you know. God knows how she manages. Of course, she’s half gipsy, she has the instinct for contriving ways and means.

‘Really! Then you have gipsy blood, Helena? Really, and you so fair, how romantic. One would never have thought —’

‘Oh, it comes out in me sometimes,’ Helena would say.

It was during the past four years, since the death of her husband, penniless, that Louisa had revealed, by small tokens and bit by bit, an aptitude for acquiring alien impenetrable luxuries.

Manders’ Figs in Syrup, with its seventy-year-old trademark — an oriental female yearning her draped form towards, and apparently worshipping a fig tree — was the only commodity that Louisa was willing to accept from her daughter’s direction. Louisa distributed the brown sealed jars of this confection among her acquaintance; it kept them in mind of the living reality underlying their verbal tradition, ‘Mrs Jepp’s daughter was a great beauty, she married into Manders’ Figs in Syrup.’

‘Tell your father,’ said Louisa, ‘that I have not written to thank him because he is too busy to read letters. He will like the Bulgarian cigarettes. They smell very high. Did he like my figs?’

‘Oh yes, he was much amused.’

‘So your mother told me when she wrote last. Did he like them?’