MURIEL SPARK
The Young Man Who
Discovered the Secret of Life
T
HE MAIN FACT WAS,
he was haunted by a ghost about five feet
high when unfurled and standing upright. For the ghost unfurled
itself from the top drawer of a piece of furniture that stood in
the young man's bed-sitting room every night, or failing that, every
morning. The young man was a plasterer's apprentice, or so he claimed.
But I have been told on good authority that this is absolutely absurd.
There is no such th ing: plasterers do not have a pprentices. Ben, as the
young man was called, was very concerned when I wrote to point this
out. He decidedly preferred to change his status to that of "bricklayer's"
or, better still, "kerblayer's apprentice," even although this meant
putting himself in an unemployed category while doing a bit of plaster–
ing on the side to make a weekly wage of sorts.
I myself had only heard of Ben through correspondence, for he had
written to me a most unusual letter, care of my publisher.
In
it, the then
"plasterer's apprentice" told about the visitations of the ghost. Nor–
mally, I would have torn up the letter; I only replied to him because one
of his statements contained the challenging one that through his ghost
Ben had discovered, or was by way of discovering "the secret of life."
[n
my reply, I was cautious about the "apparition" as 1 called his ghost,
but 1more definitely pointed out that "the secret of life" was most likely
to mean the secret of his own personal life, not life in general. The lives
of people hold many secrets, 1 emphasized. There was possibly no one
"secret" applying to us all. So, anyway, 1 wished him luck, and mailed
off the letter. Goodbye.
But no, it wasn't goodbye, as 1 might have foreseen.
It
was true that
I didn't write to him for some time, but he continued to write letters to
me in some inexplicable need that he felt to express his odd experiences,
real or imagined as the case might be.
According to Ben's letters
to
me his greatest problem with the ghost
was now blackmail and jealousy, for the ghost was truly jealous of Ben's
girlfriend.
"I can haullt whoever and wherever I wish," the ghost told Ben. "It
is easy for me to inform the whole of your acquaintance that you are
