Sergeant ends being no more than one part (along with Stanford) of Fleur Talbot's bisexual lover in Loitering With Intent. No note is taken of his death in 1987.
Stanford is mentioned often enough, because he remained an annoyance, having apparently purloined some of Spark's private papers for subsequent sale, and also because Spark gave him a dubiously prominent role in her 1988 novel A Far Cry From Kensington as the hack writer Hector Bartlett.
Spark would surely approve of the way in which Stannard dismisses all of them from her life story. It is, after all, how she dealt with them herself. But there is more to it than that. Precisely by doing so, he brings this brilliant and difficult woman even more sharply into focus.
She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg on Feb. 1, 1918, in the Morningside district of Edinburgh. Her father was a Scottish Jew. Her mother was English (from Watford) and (at least, nominally) Anglican. Stannard describes the household religion as "pagan Christian Judaism."
Barney Camberg worked for the North British Rubber Co. Though their living quarters were small and cramped, they managed to take in lodgers, principally to pay for better schooling for Muriel and her older brother, Philip.
The school they attended was called Gillespie's. One teacher in particular, Christina Kay, "entered my imagination immediately," Spark wrote in her odd autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. "I started to write about her even then." In Spark's most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Gillespie's becomes the Marcia Blaine School. Miss Brodie herself owes a good deal to Miss Kay, though Stannard points out that it is "the difference between [Spark's] characters and their 'originals' which is telling, particularly in the case of Kay/Brodie."
