Read Online Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online

other side.
    â€˜Clovis is all right, too,’ Heloise says. ‘I’ll miss
Clovis.’
    Pablo says, ‘He could stay with us. Why shouldn’t he stay
with us?’
    â€˜Clovis can stay with us,’ says Hadrian.
    â€˜The Baroness was natural,’ says Heloise. ‘I’ll say that.
Why shouldn’t she be photographed and filmed in the nude?’
    Hadrian stops dancing. ‘You know what?’ he says. ‘Sorry
for Victor Passerat I am not. Neither alive nor dead.’
    â€˜Nor me,’ says Heloise.
    â€˜He had a kind of something,’ Pablo says, jerking his
arms as he rocks.
    â€˜I know,’ says Hadrian. ‘But it didn’t correspond.’
    â€˜Funny that it had to be him,’ says Heloise.
    Pablo says, ‘It could have been one of the others.’
    Hadrian says, ‘But she decided on him. She got hooked on
him.’
    â€˜It was inevitable,’ says Heloise.
    â€˜It could have been someone else,’ Pablo says. ‘Anyone
could have made his mistake.’
    â€˜There’s such a thing as a trend,’ Hadrian says. ‘If he
was hooked on the Baron he should have coordinated.’
    â€˜Well he didn’t coordinate,’ says Heloise, putting her
looking-glass back on the table, then lighting a cigarette.
    They stop talking for a while. Heloise smokes her
cigarette, languidly regarding the dance. When the music ends, the young men
together silently choose another record and put it on. First Hadrian, then
Pablo, start once more to dance, bobbing and swaying as if blown by a current
which fuses out from the beat of the music.
    After a while, Heloise says, ‘I like Mr McGuire.’
    â€˜The finest sound-track man in the business. He
coordinates,’ says Hadrian.
    â€˜Very professional, though,’ says Pablo. ‘That kind of
puts a division, doesn’t it?’
    â€˜Mr McGuire and Mr Samuel,’ says Hadrian, ‘are in a class
by themselves. You can’t judge against them just because they made a success.
They’re a great team.’
    â€˜They went to prison for it,’ Hadrian says.
    â€˜Is that true?’ Pablo says, and simultaneously Heloise
says, ‘Did they? When was that?’
    â€˜Yes, when they started the business six, seven years
ago. Mr Samuel told me a lot about it,’ Hadrian says, stopping his long spell of
dancing without any sign of having spent energy. ‘Mr Samuel told me,’ he says,
‘that they were doing it for small money. If you do a thing for peanuts you get
caught for a crime. You have to do it privately for big money like everything
else.’
    Pablo stops dancing and sits on the bed.
    â€˜How did they do it before?’ he says.
    â€˜It was the same technique. Mr Samuel did the photography
and Mr McGuire did the sound-track. They put code ads in the papers. They got a
lot of responses.’
    â€˜A lovely technique, they have,’ Heloise says. ‘I must
say I liked it when they did me with Irene and Lister. Mr McGuire kept saying,
“Speak out your fantasies”, like that. I didn’t know what the hell to say, I
thought he meant a fairy story, so I started with Little Red Riding Hood, and Mr
McGuire said “That’s great, Heloise! You’re great!” So I went on with Little Red
Riding Hood and Lister and Irene changed sides. They joined in with Red Riding
Hood. Lister was terrific as the grandmother when he ate me up. You can see in
the film that I had a good time. Then Irene got eaten up by Lister’s understudy.
Mr Samuel is an artist, I’ll say that, his perspectives coalesce.’
    Hadrian says, ‘Eleanor always does her Princess bit. You
can’t get her to do anything else.’
    â€˜Too old to change,’ Pablo says, ‘but she does it good. I
like the Princess and the Pea where she can’t sleep on her bed. You should
always do your own thing in a simulation. It all works in. The