The Public Image by Muriel Spark

Author:Muriel Spark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780811221351
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1968-04-18T04:30:00+00:00

In the first dawn light Annabel lay in the small bedroom beside the sleeping baby and summed up, for herself, the probabilities that lay ahead.

The press conference had gone off fairly well. Not well, but fairly well, and, considering the hunted private lives of other actors of spectacular name, she felt that hers had been secured for the time being. It was the first news-break that counted most. Anything that could be turned into a scandal with the first news would be done now; it set the tone for the next few days, these being the most critical days for the survival of a public image under threat.

Two years before there had been a very young, newly-celebrated, Belgian actress of Annabel’s acquaintance, quaintly famous in every magazine for strict morals, absence of lovers, presence of chaperones, dresses which covered arms, throat and knees, and for a speech condemning birth control. She played the successive roles of Nurse Cavell and Joan of Arc. Her public image had been less skilfully handled than had Annabel’s, lending itself to jokes and easy ruin. But still, she had seemed ripe for a star career before she was foolish enough to call the police on finding a student under her bed in the small hours of the morning. This girl had heard a noise under her bed, switched on the light, looked, and found the grinning student. He had done it for a bet, but that was not his story, and although it all blew over, this actress never regained her hold. Annabel reflected on this, when the neighbours had gone, following the departure of the press. She felt she had arranged things well in the emergency. Her stroke of good fortune for the evening was that Kurt, that blond, hostile journalist who had come to the party, was not present.

She felt cold with a coldness that nothing could warm. She lay on her bed with the baby beside her while the white slits of dawn formed up between the slats in the shutters. That doctor’s child had come running in, moaning, among the news-men and the cameras, with a cut hand, the blood running on to her wrist and staining her horrible fawn dress. The mother had shrieked. The father had got busy with the cut hand, taking the child off to the bathroom to wash it, and demanding clean handkerchiefs from the people around. It was only a temporary divergence. Annabel had made a move to get up and concern herself, but the neighbours pinned her down. Little Carl in her arms started to cry. One of the neighbours took him, and then another, and soon the baby was joyfully responding to the company, being passed from hand to hand in the Roman popular fashion. Cameras were plucked like guitars and whirled like barrel organs. Meantime the doctor’s child had managed to say, quite clearly,

‘It was a bit of glass from your party that cut me, Mrs Annabel. Why did your friends break

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