Going up to Sotheby's

Muriel Spark

This was the wine. It stained the top of the page when she knocked over the glass accidentally. A pity, she said, to lose that drop. For the wine was a treat.

Here's a coffee-cup ring, and another. He preferred coffee to tea.

Some pages re-written entirely, scored through, cancelled over and over on this, his most important manuscript.

That winter they took a croft in Perthshire, living on oats and rabbits bought for a few pence from the madman.

The children thrived, and she got them to school daily, mostly by trudge.

He was glad to get the children out of the way, but always felt cold while working on his book. This is his most important manuscript, completed 1929.

'Children, go and play outside. Your father's trying to work.

But keep away from the madman's house.'

He looked up from his book. 'There's nothing wrong with the madman'.

Which was true.

She typed out the chapters in the afternoons. He looked happily at her.

He worked best late at night.

'Aren't you ever coming to bed? I often wonder, are you married to me or to your bloody book?'

A smudge on the page, still sticky after all these years.

Something greasy on the last page.

This is that manuscript, finished in the late spring, crossed-out, dog-eared; this, the original, passed through several literary hands while the pages she had typed were at the publishers'.

One personage has marked a passage with red ink, has written in the margin, 'Are you sure?'

Five publishers rejected it in spite of recommendations.

The sixth decided to risk his pounds sterling down the drain for the sake of prestige. The author was a difficult customer. However, they got the book published at last.

Her parents looked after the children while the couple went to France for a short trip. This bundle of paper, the original manuscript, went into a fibre trunk, got damp into it, got mouldy and furled.

It took fifteen more years for him to make his reputation, by which time the children had grown up, Agnes as a secretary at the BBC. Leo as a teacher.

The author died in '48, his wife in '68.

Agnes and Leo married and begat.

And now the grandchildren are selling the manuscript.

Bound and proud, documented and glossed by scholars of the land, smoothed out and precious, these leaves of paper are going up to Sotheby's. The wine-stained, stew-stained and mould-smelly papers are going up to Sotheby's. They occupy the front seat of the Renault, beside the driver.

They are a national event. They are going up to make their fortune at last, which once were so humble, tattered, and so truly working-class.