The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online

She had thought he was a playwright when she had married him; that didn’t last. But she knew he could never settle to any sort of scholarship. In fact, he was a very good teacher. He got good results, of which Chris was an example. Rowland’s novel, she thought, was threatening to break up the school. I am too young at twenty-six to be a wife-psychiatrist, she thought. Let him think of, let him analyze, me. I should have married a scholar. (Eventually Nina, herself, was to become an art historian, but that was after great effort, and after time ahead . . .) Meanwhile at College Sunrise, she was saying to herself, I am married to a state of mind. She decided to tell Rowland she was bored with his novel, but the words that came out were, “I think Chris went looking for Israel and Giovanna. I wonder if he saw them?”
    Chris pondered on the nature of jealousy. He was thinking of Darnley’s fierce and primitive jealousy of Rizzio, his wife’s favorite, her musician, her confidential friend. In his life he had not yet experienced jealousy at work, although he knew the sensation, and could recognize it in others. He had sometimes envied other boys, and recognized the feeling as a sort of admiration. He knew what it was to want what others had and that he had not, such as a stable family life. And Chris also understood that when it came to looking closely at the thing or condition desired (such as other children’s “stable family life”) in fact it didn’t seem so very desirable, if indeed it existed at all.
    What is jealousy? Jealousy is to say, what you have got is mine, it is mine, it is mine? Not quite. It is to say, I hate you because you have got what I have not got and desire. I want to be me, myself, but in your position, with your opportunities, your fascination, your looks, your abilities, your spiritual good.
    Chris, like any of us, would have been astonished if he had known that Rowland, through jealousy, had thought with some tormented satisfaction of Chris dying in his sleep.
    College Sunrise was decently but sparsely furnished, with a predominance of good modern Swedish pinewood. Throughout the house there was a minimum of curtains and cushions. The students stuck posters on their bedroom walls according to their tastes and the bookshelves contained many objects besides books, their private property, including bottles of bath lotion, piles of CDs, wooden carvings, shells, ceramic mugs. The beds were covered with colored quilts. In the public rooms, as in the bedrooms, there were no carpets. The floors were made of large dark paving tiles, kept in a fairly shiny condition.
    The mobile quality of the school was facilitated by this austerity. Visitors from outside found it unaccountably desirable: “Oh, if only one could always live like this, so calm, so uncluttered, so clean.” It was moveable and cleanable. Nina and Rowland had planned it precisely for this purpose. But Nina sometimes longed for a less functional environment, for rugs and vases of flower arrangements. She had one comfortable armchair to herself, in the study she shared with Rowland.
    She curled up in it while reading aloud a letter that had made her very cheerful. It was from Pansy Leghorn’s mother. The girl had left the Cambridge summer course after four days, finding it far too “bourgeois” after College Sunrise.
    “I can’t tell you,” she read aloud to Rowland, “the difference in Leg after her two terms with you. She used to be so stiff and goody-goody, all Girl Guide and Sunday school. I thought she would end up as a clerk in the post office or a woman priest. She actually wore golf socks over her stockings and oh my God those white blouses. But now I assure you, Ms. Mahler, you have done wonders for Leg. She has painted the kitchen ceiling green. (The paint got into our lunch, our daily was livid) and she wears skintight jeans and skirts up to here. You must know she looks lovely now . . .” Nina stopped reading. “Are