Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online Page A

her return to London to finalize her divorce, Maria heard the story of Lucan’s visit from her husband. He felt the young daughter was bound to provide a version of Lucan’s visit followed by that of the exciting policemen. At the time Maria accepted Alfred’s actions as normal.
    And now, decades later, Maria Twickenham reads in the paper of yet another sighting of the missing seventh Earl. According to this report he was observed reclining in a hammock, in a British fruit merchant’s luxurious garden somewhere small and, to Maria, forgettable, in East Africa. He appeared to have been plastically altered but was still, with the help of a computer’s identikit system, recognizable. The reporter of this news had returned next day with a photographer but the hounded one, having sensed danger, had gone. At the house nobody could help. “A white man of about sixty lying in a hammock? You must be mad. People have been turning up here all morning. I’m going to rename my house Pilgrim’s Rest. Anyway, there’s no one here this time of year . . .” Maria thought back over the years which had done so much to change her life, her personality, her looks, her principles, her everything in a way, little by little. She thought back.
    To Maria the memory was like that pill-box veiled hat she had found among her old things, dating from the early seventies, last worn at the Derby. She could not wear the hat anymore, nor could she again accept the concealment of Lucan. Certainly, she knew that if it were to happen to her now, if it were to happen that a Lucan should turn up bloodstained and frantic with a perfectly ridiculous story about passing a basement window and seeing his wife being attacked by a man, Maria, herself, would not clean him up, feed him and pass him on to the next set of good friends. Friendship? Yes, but there can be too severe a strain on friendship. In friendship there is a point of collapse-a murderer revealed, or a traitor-they are people-within-people hitherto unknown.
    But what was the difference, Maria wondered, between then and now? More than a quarter of a century was the difference. Alfred had married again, had died. There was something in the air one breathed. Habits change. States of mind change. Collective moods change. The likeable, working-class, murdered young nanny was now the main factor. At the time the center of the affair was Lucan.
    Maria’s daughter Lacey, now over thirty, had started in her late teens to influence her mother in a quite natural and unpremeditated way. Having read the most sensible and well-informed of the books on the subject of Lucan, Maria’s daughter said, “How could you ever know such a type? What possessed Daddy to help him to escape? But how could he have been a friend in any case, such a ghastly snob? Anyway, if he could kill once he could kill again, no matter he wasn’t tried for murder, the risk of his being a killer is overwhelming. Hadn’t anyone any feelings for the poor lovely nurse-girl? Did everyone really believe he could be excused for attempting to kill his wife simply because he didn’t like her and didn’t want her to have custody of the children? Was Lucan mad?” In some cases, Lacey reflected, there comes a moment when the best of friends, the most admiring, most affectionate, when faced with a certain person’s repeated irrational behavior, have to admit that the person is more or less mad. “Mad” covers a whole minefield of mental conditions.
    Maria’s daughter, now beginning to be free, her children already in their teens, wanted to write a book. People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education. Lacey’s main experience was based on her mother’s, which was the fact that