The Portobello Road by Muriel Spark
"The Portobello Road" by Muriel Spark is an episodic story that explores the complex relationships among four childhood friends: Needle, George, Kathleen, and John. The narrative begins with a childhood incident where Needle earns her nickname after accidentally injuring herself while playing in a haystack. This seemingly innocent moment serves as a backdrop for the evolving dynamics of their friendship over time. As the friends grow into adulthood, their lives take different paths, leading to a dramatic confrontation fueled by secrets and unfulfilled promises.
The story juxtaposes joyful memories of youth with the challenges of adult life, including love, jealousy, and betrayal. A pivotal moment occurs when George reveals his secret marriage to Matilda, a revelation that ultimately leads to Needle's tragic death at his hands. Following the incident, George's psychological torment manifests as he becomes haunted by Needle's ghost, entangling him further in a cycle of guilt and madness. The tale concludes with George and Kathleen trying to escape their past by emigrating to Canada, symbolizing the dissolution of their once-close friendship and the unresolved emotional turmoil that lingers. This narrative not only examines the impact of secrets on relationships but also highlights the haunting nature of unresolved issues that can persist long after friendships have changed.
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The Portobello Road by Muriel Spark
First published: 1958
Type of plot: Ghost story
Time of work: 1930-1950
Locale: London, rural Great Britain, and the British colonies in Africa
Principal Characters:
Needle , the narrator, one of a group of friendsKathleen , Needle's best childhood friendJohn (Skinny) , another childhood friendGeorge , the fourth of the group of friends
The Story
This episodic story begins with an account of how Needle got her unusual nickname: by reaching into a haystack on which she and her friends, George, Kathleen, and John, were playing and accidentally impaling the fleshy part of her thumb with a needle that lay hidden in the hay. After some minor first aid, George marks the occasion by taking a photograph, which serves throughout the story as a memento of the youthful friendship that these people shared—a friendship that survives, although in modified form, through a lengthy period of change as they mature.
As the first episode marks the earliest event in the chronology of the story, the second marks virtually the latest. Needle describes an accidental meeting with George and Kathleen that occurs many years after the haystack episode, when Kathleen is nearing thirty-five years of age. Needle is passing through the Saturday crowds in the Portobello Road, an open-air market area of London, when she comes across her two old friends, who are now married to each other. Acting under an inner prompting, Needle speaks to George, who is horrified to see her. When he tells Kathleen that Needle is nearby, she insists that he is mistaken because, as she remarks at the end of the episode, Needle has been dead for five years.
The remainder of the story recounts the progressive decline of the unusual relationship between these four childhood friends. Although Needle does not use the term, she clearly suggests in the succeeding narrative, an interlude between the second and third episodes, that she is spending the time after her death clearing up the "unfinished business" of this relationship. The nature of that business is, in large part, both the source of the story's interest and the basis of its surprising conclusion.
In the third episode, Needle picks up the chronological account that begins with the haystack episode at the beginning of the story. No longer mere children, the four friends are preparing to take up adult lives in London and the south of England, far from their native territory on the Scottish border: John, nicknamed "Skinny," goes to study archaeology; George and Kathleen, to take up connections with wealthy family members; and Needle, to undertake a career as a writer. George soon decides to go to Africa and work on his uncle's tobacco farm, and his approaching departure from familiar surroundings and friends makes him both anxious and eager to remind them that they must maintain their friendship. In the way of persons whose early friendships survive changing adult interests, the four keep track of one another despite the changes.
John arranges a job for Needle as secretary to an archaeological dig in Africa, where the two have the opportunity to see George again and to discover his dissatisfaction and sense of isolation, as well as the fact that he is living with Matilda, a woman of mixed race, who is pregnant by him. Needle soon quits her job with the party of archaeologists and scrapes together a living as a columnist for a local paper. She meets George once again, just before World War II breaks out, and he gives evidence of jealousy over her apparent attachment to John and her coolness toward him. In a fit of honesty, George tells Needle that he has secretly married Matilda because she refused to live with him any longer unless he did so. He has since arranged, through the wealth of his uncle, to get Matilda to live separately from him, although he cannot persuade her to divorce him because she is Catholic. Perhaps regretting his candor, George insists that Needle promise never to tell the secret he has shared, and she does so, leaving Africa shortly thereafter, just as the war breaks out.
After the war, which George spends away from England, the other three friends keep up a casual but earnest friendship. Needle and John are almost ready to marry when John contracts tuberculosis, and during the period of his convalescence abroad, Needle lives in England, contriving to piece together a living from a variety of odd jobs as a writer, publicist, and companion. Kathleen suddenly calls her with news: George is back in England and apparently eager to reestablish old ties, even though the other three have not heard from him for almost ten years. Kathleen seems quite eager to welcome him back on the old terms, or perhaps even closer ones, but Needle is less sanguine.
Needle leaves the south of England for a brief holiday, during which she learns by letter that Kathleen and George are seeing much of each other. When she returns to London, Kathleen arranges for her to spend a weekend at a country house belonging to Kathleen's aunt; George is living nearby and is expected as a guest at dinner. When Kathleen is delayed, Needle goes down to the country house alone, with the object of buying groceries and other supplies.
At a nearby farm, where she has gone to buy milk, she meets George, bound on the same errand. George asks to accompany her to the house, and when they stop to rest on a haystack along the path through the farm, she soon discovers that he has an important matter to discuss with her: He plans to marry Kathleen, and he wants further assurance that Needle will not tell the secret about Matilda, to whom he is still legally married. Needle refuses, telling him unequivocally that she will tell Kathleen about Matilda if he attempts to marry her. At this response, Needle reports that "he looked as if he would murder me and he did," by stuffing hay into her mouth until she suffocated.
Her body is later discovered, and George is questioned by the police, but no charge can be brought against him. Although the police check George's African history and discover the fact of his living with Matilda, the marriage itself remains undiscovered. Kathleen and George are married, and the interval passes until Needle speaks to George once more, in the Portobello Road on a Saturday morning.
In the concluding section, Needle explains how she and George begin to look for each other on Saturdays in the Portobello Road; George is both attracted and repelled by the ghost of the woman he murdered. In the end, he is driven almost mad, and Kathleen has all that she can do to keep him away from the road on Saturday mornings. John finally persuades them to emigrate to Canada—where George will be free of the compulsion to visit the road—and the long-standing, unusual relationship among the four friends finally dissolves.