‘The bags are packed,’ she said. ‘And he’s a genuine medium.’
‘Just keep still,’ Matthew said. ‘Nothing matters.’
‘A most disreputable case,’ said the judge. ‘A widow … her savings. The distasteful proceedings — I may say without prejudice to any more respectable manifestations of the cult as might exist — the distasteful proceedings of the séance room and the scope it offers for the intimidation of weak people…. The evidence given by Mr. Socket must be looked into: these courts must be kept clean of…. Mrs. Flower has been a very foolish woman.’ He glanced towards Patrick. ‘Have you anything to say?’
Patrick looked at Fergusson and then at the judge.
‘Only,’ he said, ‘to ask—”
‘Speak up, please.’
‘Only to say that the lady I am living with is expecting a baby and needs me by her side, and—’
The judge did not look up. ‘I cannot sentence you to less than five years.’
‘I don’t believe in God,’ said Alice, clutching her stomach.
Ronald went home to bed. He slept heavily and woke at midnight, and went out to walk off his demons.
Martin Bowles, Patrick Seton, Socket.
And the others as well, rousing him up: fruitless souls, crumbling tinder, like his own self which did not bear thinking of. But it is all demonology, he thought, and he brought them all to witness, in his old style, one by one before the courts of his mind. Tim Raymond, Ewart Thornton, Walter Prett, Matthew Finch — will I, won’t I marry her? — Eccie, and himself kicking under the witness box, himself, now, incensed; and all the rest of them. He sent these figures away like demons of the air until he could think of them again with indifference or amusement or wonder.
How long will it take, he wondered to distract his mind, for Matthew to marry Alice? Not knowing at the time that it would take four months — a week before the baby was born — Ronald laid a bet with himself for three months.
It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others besides ourselves, he thought, who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history. Others ferment in prison; some rot, maimed; some lean over the banisters of presbyteries to see if anyone is going to answer the telephone.
He walked round the houses, calculating, to test his memory, the numbers of the bachelors — thirty-eight thousand five hundred streets, and seventeen point one bachelors to a street — lying awake, twisting and murmuring, or agitated with their bedfellows, or breathing in deep repose between their sheets, all over London, the metropolitan city.
THE END
Muriel Spark, The Bachelors
(Series: # )
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