Muriel Spark, the Double Agent

One weekend in 1923, in Edinburgh, Scotland, a red-headed little girl named Nita McEwen was on a walk with her parents when she saw her double. The doppelgänger was another child, walking with her own mother. Each girl stared into the mirror of the other, but kept moving. At school the next fall, the double, named Muriel Camberg, appeared in the first grade, a year below Nita, and it turned out that she lived around the corner from Nita, too, although Muriel’s street was slightly nicer. These small differences seemed important, something bitter to cut the sweet, enveloping taste of spookiness.