Read Online The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page B

deliberately to betray our identity.’
    ‘Why
was he allowed to do it? Wasn’t there any security?’
    Paul
says, ‘You might well ask. Our security slipped up.’
    ‘Well,
it was a long time ago,’ Pierre is saying as he flicks through the bound pages
of a script lying on his knee.
    ‘Your
mother was in difficulty with Kiel. She was suspected of having an affair with
him. I had to get her out of that difficulty. And I did.’
    ‘You
put Kiel in jail after the war?’
    ‘I was
instrumental. Everyone else thought he was just a wild boy. But he was an
agent, all right. I tracked him down as an S.S. man. He’d been in the S.S. all
along. He started operating in the East after the war. I got him out of there.
He did some damage but we got him in the end.’
    ‘Well
he’s dead now,’ Pierre is saying. ‘Poor old Kiel.’
    ‘He’s
here in New York,’ says Paul.
    ‘No, he
isn’t,’ says Pierre.
    ‘Princess
Xavier thinks so.’
    ‘Does
she? I thought she didn’t.’
    ‘Sometimes
she does,’ says the father, ‘and sometimes she doesn’t. You can’t trust women.’
    ‘Mother
doesn’t think it’s Kiel. She thinks he looks too young.’
    ‘It
depends,’ says Paul, ‘what she’s feeling like. One week she’ll say yes and the
next week she’ll say no. I say yes.’
    ‘I say
no,’ says Pierre. ‘I went and established it. He died in jail.’
    ‘The
records are wrong. He must have had a body substituted for his.’
    ‘Why
don’t you forget it?’ says Pierre.
    ‘My life’s
in danger,’ says Paul. ‘Messages on the soles of shoes.’
    ‘Katerina
says he’s a shoe store man, nothing more.’
    ‘Your
sister Katerina’s a liar. She hasn’t been near him.’
    ‘She
says she has.’
    ‘Yes,
she says. She’s no good. She says anything.’
    ‘What
does it matter? Spies don’t matter any more,’ Pierre says. ‘There isn’t any war
and peace any more, no good and evil, no communism, no capitalism, no fascism.
There’s only one area of conflict left and that’s between absurdity and
intelligence.’
    ‘Oh,
for God’s sake,’ says the father. ‘What are you trying to do to me, you and
Katerina together? My life’s in danger. Look at your mother, she’s in
difficulties.’
    ‘Her
shadow falls the way it wants,’ Pierre says.
    ‘Stop!’
says Paul. ‘I won’t hear it!’
    ‘You
think I haven’t noticed it?’
    ‘You
must be crazy,’ says Paul. His throat beats with a throbbing that reaches his
ears; help me, help me, cries the throb.
    ‘Peter
Pan,’ says Pierre, ‘is going to be a very big
success. We aren’t changing a word of it. We have permission to put it on; we
have a contract. We didn’t tell the J. M. Barrie trustees that everyone who’s
acting in it is over sixty. The age doesn’t come into the contract. They can’t
stop us. It’ll be a riot.’
    ‘If we
could get rid of Garven,’ Paul says, ‘I’d raise the money or the best part of
it and help you. It sounds obscene, though.’
    ‘Peter
Pan is a very obscene play. Our presentation will
only help to direct attention to that fact,’ says Pierre, looking cornerwise at
his father. ‘Our talent will reveal the absurdity of the thing. The show will
be a success, a big success.’
    ‘If we
could get rid of Garven,’ Paul says.
    ‘And
Kiel? You still want to get rid of Kiel?’ says his son.
    ‘Of
course. That’s the most urgent factor, Kiel.’
    ‘And
Garven?’
    ‘Garven
has to go.’
    ‘Set
them one against the other,’ says the son.
    ‘How?’
says the father. ‘That’s what I ask. You think I haven’t thought of it?’
    ‘Money,’
says Pierre, ‘is how things are done.’
    ‘Not
everything,’ says Paul, ‘that’s what you of the younger generation don’t
realise.’
    ‘I’m
not of the younger generation,’ Pierre says. ‘I’m only younger than you. The
younger generation is a whole generation away from mine. Nothing to do with
me.’
    ‘I have
to go,’ says Paul, clinking the ice