Read Online Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Muriel Spark
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dangerous,’ Lina said.
‘That’s a very bright point. She might indeed. But she’s very boring, even to her friends, I could see that.’
‘Dangerous people often seem boring,’ said Lina.
‘So do useful people, very often,’ mused Serge.
He did not discern what type of alert interest Lina was taking in his story, his anecdotes of London, of university life, his hosts and hostesses, the Hampstead of Deborah and the Deborah of Hampstead. He understood only that she was entertained by his travellers’ tales, and the absurdity of the foreign ways he was describing.
He was unaware that the same story that can repel can also enchant, according to the listener. It happened that Lina’s imagination was inflamed with the exciting possibilities of western life, the more Serge reported what he had perceived as hilarious decadence. Taking it for granted she was exactly of his mind, he expounded on the wastefulness, the selfishness, the inequality, the social injustice and the hypocrisy of western left-wing ideas, illustrating them with anecdotes till Lina’s mother came home, looked in on them, smiled, said goodnight and went to bed. Even then Serge went on and on, while Lina drank in the marvels, as they appeared to her, of wearing long skirts and tangled hair in an eight-room house, very expensive, with two liberated daughters and a husband who wasn’t there but who paid the bills. She was stirred by the sheer magic of being a woman with enough money to take a handsome Polish or Bulgarian student out to dine at a restaurant and home to bed. Lina, who was then twenty-three, transformed in her mind as she listened, even the farthest peripheries of Serge’s account ‘… She was arranging flowers in the sitting-room. She had only just got home from the office, her car was still outside the gate. There was a ring at the bell; she opened the door; it was a man who said he was the piano-tuner for the people upstairs who had a flat there—you see it was a divided house. Well, she let him go up, without thinking any more about it, and do you know, he was a big-time thief, he took all their. …’ To Lina, the magic ideas were contained in the phrases, ‘just got home from the office … her car outside the gate’; ‘… piano-tuner for the people upstairs …’; ‘… she was arranging flowers in the sitting-room’; and it didn’t signify in the least to Lina that the story was about a big-time thief, so long as these phrases were dancing in her ears, making colours in the mind’s eye. It was rather like the time, only a few years ago, when a tourist-lady from Moscow had called with a letter of introduction to Lina’s mother in Sofia. The stranger had reminisced a while, talking wistfully about the years before the war, the late nineteen thirties, in the same way as the old White Russians were said to speak of the years before the revolution. The woman tourist’s husband had evidently been in trouble, there had been a misunderstanding. It was a long story, during which Lina made tea, sliced a lemon and prettily put out some sweet biscuits. The voice droned on: ‘… and, well, there was I with my husband in prison and my daughter Kyra to bring up and educate. She had to go to her dancing lessons, there was a state scholarship of course, but how could I manage to make her frocks? To walk to the dancing class she had her bronze velvet dress with lace collar and cuffs, so charming, but. …’ Whereupon Lina, careless of the woman’s past plight, was quite carried away by the thought of the small daughter being taken to her state dancing class in a velvet dress and lace collar, in the sunny Muscovian springtime. Lina, for all her twenty years at that time, felt a heart-yearning for Moscow, and spent many months brooding how she could manage a student-exchange or some sort of work-permit to leave Bulgaria and go to the Soviet Union, to Leningrad even, or wonderful Moscow.
But her dreams fed on Serge’s stories
‘That’s a very bright point. She might indeed. But she’s very boring, even to her friends, I could see that.’
‘Dangerous people often seem boring,’ said Lina.
‘So do useful people, very often,’ mused Serge.
He did not discern what type of alert interest Lina was taking in his story, his anecdotes of London, of university life, his hosts and hostesses, the Hampstead of Deborah and the Deborah of Hampstead. He understood only that she was entertained by his travellers’ tales, and the absurdity of the foreign ways he was describing.
He was unaware that the same story that can repel can also enchant, according to the listener. It happened that Lina’s imagination was inflamed with the exciting possibilities of western life, the more Serge reported what he had perceived as hilarious decadence. Taking it for granted she was exactly of his mind, he expounded on the wastefulness, the selfishness, the inequality, the social injustice and the hypocrisy of western left-wing ideas, illustrating them with anecdotes till Lina’s mother came home, looked in on them, smiled, said goodnight and went to bed. Even then Serge went on and on, while Lina drank in the marvels, as they appeared to her, of wearing long skirts and tangled hair in an eight-room house, very expensive, with two liberated daughters and a husband who wasn’t there but who paid the bills. She was stirred by the sheer magic of being a woman with enough money to take a handsome Polish or Bulgarian student out to dine at a restaurant and home to bed. Lina, who was then twenty-three, transformed in her mind as she listened, even the farthest peripheries of Serge’s account ‘… She was arranging flowers in the sitting-room. She had only just got home from the office, her car was still outside the gate. There was a ring at the bell; she opened the door; it was a man who said he was the piano-tuner for the people upstairs who had a flat there—you see it was a divided house. Well, she let him go up, without thinking any more about it, and do you know, he was a big-time thief, he took all their. …’ To Lina, the magic ideas were contained in the phrases, ‘just got home from the office … her car outside the gate’; ‘… piano-tuner for the people upstairs …’; ‘… she was arranging flowers in the sitting-room’; and it didn’t signify in the least to Lina that the story was about a big-time thief, so long as these phrases were dancing in her ears, making colours in the mind’s eye. It was rather like the time, only a few years ago, when a tourist-lady from Moscow had called with a letter of introduction to Lina’s mother in Sofia. The stranger had reminisced a while, talking wistfully about the years before the war, the late nineteen thirties, in the same way as the old White Russians were said to speak of the years before the revolution. The woman tourist’s husband had evidently been in trouble, there had been a misunderstanding. It was a long story, during which Lina made tea, sliced a lemon and prettily put out some sweet biscuits. The voice droned on: ‘… and, well, there was I with my husband in prison and my daughter Kyra to bring up and educate. She had to go to her dancing lessons, there was a state scholarship of course, but how could I manage to make her frocks? To walk to the dancing class she had her bronze velvet dress with lace collar and cuffs, so charming, but. …’ Whereupon Lina, careless of the woman’s past plight, was quite carried away by the thought of the small daughter being taken to her state dancing class in a velvet dress and lace collar, in the sunny Muscovian springtime. Lina, for all her twenty years at that time, felt a heart-yearning for Moscow, and spent many months brooding how she could manage a student-exchange or some sort of work-permit to leave Bulgaria and go to the Soviet Union, to Leningrad even, or wonderful Moscow.
But her dreams fed on Serge’s stories
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