Free The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark Page A

walking
reflectively round her with his eyes on her feet. ‘I don’t know,’ he says in
his precise foreign voice, ‘if we have a smaller size in that model. I’ll have
to see.’
    She
stamps her left foot. ‘Definitely too big. Boots especially — you know, they
slip up and down your leg if they’re too big.’
    ‘A
minute,’ he says, and goes to the back of the shop. Elsa yawns. A very thin
woman with a champagne-coloured head of dead-looking hair and a long, squeezed,
but distinguished face comes in and stares around, waiting it seems, for an
assistant. It is the lunch-hour. No assistant appears, although Elsa’s man can
be heard playing with cardboard boxes somewhere at the back and, from the
sound, evidently high up on a ladder.
    ‘He
won’t be a minute,’ Elsa tells the woman, and sits down.
    The
woman sits down, too, and looks at Elsa’s shadow, then at her own, then at the
other shadows, referring them, too, back to Elsa’s.
    ‘Yes,’
says Elsa.
    ‘What?’
says the woman.
    ‘Now
you know,’ Elsa says.
    ‘Excuse
me?’ says the woman.
    ‘You
know it’s true, you’ve seen for yourself,’ Elsa says. ‘And now you can button
up that common little mutation mink jacket and take yourself back to your
office, and put through a call to my husband, and tell him that it’s true, he’s
got a big problem, as he says. I’m tired of seeing you follow me around. You’ve
been shadowing me for three weeks, but you’re a hopeless shadow.’
    Her
real shadow makes a hopeless gesture in keeping with her real hand. The woman
abruptly stands up.
    The
salesman comes back with two boots, one brown, and one red. ‘Try these for
size, Elsa. I’ll have to order them in black if you want them in black.’ Then
he notices the other woman, and thinking her fretful, says to her, ‘Take a
seat, Madam.’
    But she
goes, buttoning her pale mink jacket, banging the glass door, so that the
salesman frowns.
    ‘My
husband’s analyst,’ Elsa says. ‘She’s been following me for three weeks.’
    ‘She
looked upset,’ says the salesman.
    ‘I told
her to clear off,’ says Elsa. ‘I was rude.’
    ‘Well,
now she knows.’
    ‘Yes,
now she knows. And I daresay she thinks you’re Helmut Kiel.’
    ‘From
all you have told me, Elsa,’ says the salesman fondly, ‘I wish I had been that
man.’
    She
pulls up the boot, stands, and stamps her left foot.
    ‘Pierre’s
play is opening at last, next Thursday, ‘she says.
    ‘You
must be proud of your son,’ he says with a correct little bow.
    ‘Well I
can’t say one way or another till I’ve seen the reviews.’
    He
giggles, evidently delighted with her ways. ‘It should have opened last spring,
but there was a hitch. My husband didn’t finance it enough, so I had to help.
The theatre is called the Very Much Club, only it isn’t a club, it’s a theatre
in Greenwich Village, I believe.’
    ‘Is it
a good play?’ says the man, stroking the boots which Elsa has now taken off and
handed to him.
    ‘It
sounds awful. But it might make money. My son doesn’t need money.’
    ‘Why
don’t you just grab your jewellery and run away?’ says her friend.
    ‘Why
should I take my jewellery?’
    ‘That’s
.what jewellery’s for. Every woman grabs her jewellery when she runs away,
doesn’t she?’
    ‘Only
if she has no money. In my case, I’m the one with the money.’
    ‘Then
go wherever your money is,’ he says.
    ‘Switzerland,’
she says. ‘Switzerland, you know.’
     
    She is
walking along the Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich, blown by the wind, indifferently
passed by the other pedestrians but never jostled. It is so different from
Manhattan where one is bumped into and almost placed under arrest by the otherwise
occupied passers, and where people rush out of arcades and buildings stripping
pieces of paper from candy-bars, then biting the bar and letting fall the paper
as they hurry along.
    She is
standing by the verge of the lake in Zürich, looking back and