The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark by Muriel Spark

Author:Muriel Spark
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2152-8
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1994-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

It was true my life was transformed. It was amazing what Winnie could do. Except for the study which I locked up every time I left the house and where Winnie could not penetrate, she penetrated everywhere. A new kitchen stove was her only extravagance. I paid no attention to Winnie’s comings and goings but it was truly remarkable how she managed to clean out the house from the basement to the attic so well that I saw through the sitting-room windows as it seemed for the first time, and my bed was actually made every day. Winnie achieved all this in a very short time. Within a week I began to have friends to meals, delicious, interesting, just right.

“How lucky you are!” was what I heard from one friend after another. There were few who would not willingly have taken Winnie away from me if they’d had the chance. My mother’s silver and crystal sparkled on the table. Winnie was quite up to serving at a late hour. And her meals were always marvellous. “Oh what elegance! How does she manage it?”

“Who is she arguing with, there in the kitchen?”

“Herself.”

For one could hear Winnie, after she had cleared away and served us coffee, muttering to herself meanwhile, in the sitting room, still fighting her lonely battles in the kitchen.

I am a man of the theater, and this oddity of Winnie’s certainly appealed to my sense of theater. Nor were my friends unappreciative of the carry-on. They thought it was delightful. As soon as she had left the room they called her a joy and they called her a treasure. One of my younger friends, an actress who had formerly liked to visit my mother in the country, had the quick eye to notice, what I hadn’t noticed, that a couple of my chairs had been newly upholstered in genuine petit-point.

“You’ve had your mother’s petit-point finished,” she said. “I remember she was working on it all last summer. The last time I saw her just before she died she was sitting out on the terrace working at this.”

“How do you know it’s Ma’s work?” I said.

“I recognize the pattern, look, that’s the Venetian design, she had it done specially, look at that red.”

“Well she must have finished it.”

“Oh, that’s impossible. It’s very slow work. For your mother, impossible.”

“Well, Winnie must have finished it.”

“Winnie? How could she have managed it with all the other things she had to do?”

“One never knows what Winnie’s up to.”

I was suspicious. But, looking back on it, I think that the truth is I didn’t want to know how Winnie did it. It was like admitting you didn’t believe in Santa Claus: all those lovely surprises might stop.

Winnie’s success with my friends wasn’t lost on her. She, too, developed a sense of her theatrical side, muttering ever the more as she served the vegetables or the coffee; and one evening when I had a few guests, for no apparent reason she entered the room with one

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