Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark

Author:Muriel Spark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2012-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Heloise has gone to bed. She is propped up with pillows, drinking tea. At the foot of her bed, sitting on either side, are Pablo the handyman and Hadrian the assistant cook, both of them as absolutely young as Heloise.

‘I really could sleep,’ she says. ‘I really feel like another nap.’

‘No,’ says Pablo. ‘Lister wants us all to be suffering from shock when the police arrive. Lack of sleep has the same effect, Lister says.’

‘I could act a state of shock at any time, and besides there’s my condition.’ She yawns, balancing her cup of tea in her left hand while covering her mouth with her right. ‘Lister’s wonderful,’ she says.

‘Terrific,’ says Hadrian.

‘Marvellous,’ says Pablo. ‘I never saw such a sense of timing.’

From the floor above comes the noise of a sharp clap, followed by another and another.

‘It sounds like guns going off,’ says Heloise.

‘Well it isn’t,’ says Pablo. ‘It’s shutters. The wind must be rising again. I loosed those shutters really good, didn’t I?’

‘Let’s put on a record,’ says Hadrian. He slides off the bed and goes to the gramophone, to choose a record, first turning them this way and that, his sharp eyesight quickly discerning the details printed on either side of the disc, even though that part of the room is dim, the only light being that by Heloise’s bed.

From above the shutters make further reports, followed by a more subdued clatter from a window below. Hadrian puts on a record and sets it going. The noise fills the room for an instant until Hadrian turns down the volume.

Then, while Heloise lights a cigarette, the two boys dance to the rock music. Heloise puts her tea-cup on the table by her bed. She takes a comb from a fringed satchel which is lying on the bed and a hand-mirror from her bedside table. She lays them on the bed while she loosens her hair which has been pulled back, ponytail style. Then she holds up the glass and begins to comb, swinging her shoulder a little in time to the rock vibrations, her tongue tapping the beat against her teeth. The boys dance, facing each other and swinging, their feet moving always in the same small area of shiny pinewood flooring.

Heloise’s room is furnished much like that of a young daughter of the house. Posters, slogans and pin-up photographs cover part of the walls. The furniture is low-built with straight lines, and upholstered with dark red, black and yellow stuff. A white woolly rug lies askew before a desk piled with coloured magazines and crayons and some boxes of various medicines. The boys’ feet just miss the rug as they continue to dance.

Heloise says, ‘She didn’t drink much, I’ll say that for her.’ She stubs out her cigarette.

Pablo stops dancing. He says, ‘You’re thinking thoughts, Heloise.’

Hadrian, who continues dancing by himself, says, ‘Heloise, relate.’

‘What do you mean, I don’t relate?’ she says.

‘When you relate you don’t ask what you mean. There’s such a thing as a trend.’

‘Who do you think you are, you — Chairman Mao?’

Pablo starts dancing again.

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