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About this Book

About Victoria Hislop

Also by Victoria Hislop

Table of Contents

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Contents

Cover

Welcome Page

Introduction

About this Book

Also by Victoria Hislop

About Victoria Hislop

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright

Extended Copyright

Introduction

While gathering the short stories for this anthology, I have read some of the most brilliant and profound pieces of writing that I have ever come across.

The authors in this anthology range from a Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, to the acknowledged queen of short stories, Alice Munro. There are Man Booker winners, Costa winners and Pulitzer winners. A few were born in the 19th century but the majority are more modern. Several of them are as yet unknown, others are household names, like Virginia Woolf. Many of the most vivid and passionate storytellers are young. And without doubt many of the most powerfully original are contemporary writers.

Apart from the writers all being female, the other guiding factor in the selection is that the stories have been written in English. The stories are varied and I am sure that no single reader will like them all. Perhaps I enjoyed certain stories because they meant something very personal to me. Others I think would be admired by any reader.

I discovered that it is possible for a short story (unlike a novel) to attain something close to perfection. Its brevity can mean that an author has the chance to produce a series of almost perfectly formed sentences, where every carefully chosen word contributes to its meaning. Occasionally the result is flawless, something a novel can never be.

Readers are allowed to be impatient with short stories. My own patience limit for a novel which I am not hugely enjoying may be three or four chapters. If it has not engaged me by then, it has lost me and is returned to the library or taken to a charity shop. With a short story, three or four pages are the maximum I allow (sometimes they are only five or six pages long in any case). A short story can entice us in without preamble or background information, and for that reason it has no excuse. It must not bore us even for a second.

If a short story has no excuse for being dull, it has even less reason to be bland. As I selected the stories for this anthology, I found myself reading stories that made me laugh out loud, gasp and often weep. If a story did not arouse a strong response in me, then I did not select it. Even if it is elegaic or whimsical, it must still stir something deep in the pit of the stomach or make the heart race.

Some stories had such a strong effect on me that I had to put a collection down and do something different with the rest of my day. I could read nothing else. I needed to ponder it, or possibly read it for a second time. Muriel Spark’s ‘The First Year of My Life’ dazzled me with its brilliance. That was a day when I didn’t need to do anything other than reflect on her wisdom. For different reasons, Alice Munro’s ‘Miles City Montana’ rendered me incapable of continuing to read. She moves seamlessly from a description of a drowned boy’s funeral to an incident on a family outing where we believe that one of the children will drown. Even the relief I felt at the story’s relatively happy conclusion was not enough to lift my mood.

Quite often an anthology is named after the author’s favourite short story, and if that were the case I would read the eponymous story first. More often, there is no particular entry point into an anthology (unless you are happy to read them in the order they appear, something I usually resisted) and in that case, there was no better guide than simply whether the title intrigued me. Who, for example, would not go straight to a story entitled ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’ (Doris Lessing), ‘A Weight Problem’ (Elspeth Davie), ‘How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.’ (Alice Walker) or even the intriguingly named: ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’ (Flannery O’Connor)?

A short story can be more surreal than many readers might tolerate with a novel and, perhaps, less grounded in reality. Succinctness sometimes allows a writer to explore ideas that may not sustain over a greater length. An example of this is Nicola Barker’s ‘Inside Information’, a shiningly original story told through the voice of an unborn child who is considering the suitability of its soon-to-be mother. Personally, I love the slightly quirky in a short story, but I would probably not be so patient if I had to listen to the voice of a foetus over three hundred pages.

I think the short story can give a writer the opportunity to experiment and to try a style or a voice that they would not use in the novel form, so there is often an element of freshness and surprise for the reader – and perhaps for the writer too.

For me, the stories that make the greatest impact are those that are the most emotional. On a few occasions, when I was reading in the library, I noted curious glances from my neighbours. They gave me sympathetic looks, but tactfully chose to ignore my tears, the context probably reassuring them that I was weeping over the fate of a fictional character rather than some personal catastrophe. Perhaps a few hours later, I would be shaking with suppressed laughter. I think I must have been a very annoying person with whom to share a desk.

I have divided the stories into three categories – Love, Loss and The Lives of Women – but these titles are loose.

Love is, of course, a central preoccupation of literature, but a love story is so often a story of loss, or indeed a story of life. Many of these stories take an amusing and sardonic look at love, so the division, though slightly artificial, is designed to give a reader the chance to read according to her or his mood. Many of them could appear under more than one heading and, I will admit, some stories could probably fit happily into all three categories.

LOVE

Love appears here in all its guises and disguises. As Yiyun Li describes in ‘Love in the Marketplace’: ‘A romance is more than a love story with a man.’

Perhaps maternal love is the most visceral of all loves. At least it felt so the first time I read the phenomenal ‘My Son the Hero’ by Clare Boylan. ‘Reach’ by Rachel Seiffert and ‘The Turtle’ by Roshi Fernando also powerfully evoke the strength of a mother’s love, and ‘Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes’ by M. J. Hyland touches beautifully on the love between father and son.

In this section there is the painful poignancy of romantic love in Margaret Drabble’s ‘Faithful Lovers’, love that is more like madness in ‘Master’ by Angela Carter and love that is unrecognised until it is too late in ‘The Man from Mars’ by Margaret Atwood. There is love that for some reason is not meant to be. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about this in ‘The Thing Around your Neck’. There is love as infatuation, short-lived and potentially destructive, in Jennifer Egan’s ‘The Watch Trick’, and the making of love, sometimes kinkily, as in Anne Enright’s ‘Revenge’.

Many readers will know the experience of being haunted by an ex, and Alison Lurie writes vividly about the effect of lost or past loves in her characters’ lives (‘In the Shadow’ and also the even more extraordinary ‘Ilse’s House’).

LOSS

Many of the stories in Loss are tragic, some are shocking. All of them are emotional.

From Katherine Mansfield’s almost unbearably poignant ‘The Canary’, which is written with a feather-light touch, to Alice Munro’s ‘Gravel’, which is blunt to the point of brutality, I think few of these stories will leave readers cold.

There are lost lives, lost loves, lost innocence, a lost mother (Colette Paul’s ‘Renaissance’), lost breasts (Ellen Gilchrist’s ‘Indignities’), loss of hearing (Helen Simpson’s ‘Sorry?’) and even a lost leopard (Anna Kavan’s extraordinary ‘A Visit’).

‘The First Year of My Life’ by Muriel Spark takes the idea that babies are born omniscient and gradually lose their power and their knowledge. In this story, a baby is born in 1913, ‘in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far’, and watches, dismayed, unsmiling, sardonic: ‘My teeth were coming through very nicely in my opinion, and well worth all the trouble I was put to in bringing them forth. I weighed twenty pounds. On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452. With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the table.’

It is a profound story – a curious companion piece to others in the anthology in which the story is also told by a wise, all-knowing baby: Nicola Barker’s masterful ‘Inside Information’ and Ali Smith’s ‘The Child’ (in The Lives of Women) are especially engaging and fresh.

Carol Shields’ ‘Fragility’, with its hinterland story of a disabled child and a couple’s lost happiness, shares much of the pathos of Yiyun Li’s ‘After a Life’, in which a dying child lies incarcerated in a small apartment. Both stories are agonising to read. Lorrie Moore’s ‘Agnes of Iowa’ is similarly tragic but even more open-ended, with a couple doomed to live in perpetuity with their woes.

Susan Hill’s ‘Father, Father’, a story of two daughters ‘losing’ their father to a second wife, their step-mother, is insightful and real, a common situation faultlessly described.

THE LIVES OF WOMEN

Life provides infinite shades of light and dark and in this section there are many curious tales and unusual settings. There is a handful of stories that made me ask: What on earth gave her this idea? Where did this come from? One example is ‘The Axe’ by Penelope Fitzgerald. It is a chilling horror story that takes place in the deceptively banal environment of an office and describes what happens when a man finds his job has been ‘axed’. The narrator leaves us, as she should in such a story, with our hairs standing on end.

There is plenty of humour in this section and this is often provided by an unexpected or rather marvellous twist. ‘How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.’ by Alice Walker is flawless. And Penelope Lively’s ‘Corruption’ is too, with the most brilliant visual image perhaps of any story – where a judge, involved in a pornography trial, takes some of his ‘research papers’ on holiday. A gust of wind sends copies of the offending magazines flying around the beach to be gathered by innocent children and even a woman who, until this moment, has been flirting with the judge. It is brilliantly comic. I felt I was watching the action unfold scene by scene, just as if I was watching a film.

There is a mildly pornographic element too in A. M. Homes’ darkly comic ‘A Real Doll’. It’s almost about love, but more to do with sex. A boy uses his sister’s Barbie as a sex toy and all sorts of jealousies ensue (Ken has an opinion, naturally). It’s funny, outrageous and totally original.

Alison Lurie’s ‘Fat People’ is once again funny, dark and unique. One could say it is about dieting, but that would only be one per cent of it. But, for me, Nicola Barker is the wittiest and often the most original. I chose three of her stories but had to restrain myself from selecting so many more. In ‘G-String’, her powers of description had me laughing out loud: ‘It felt like her G-string was making headway from between her buttocks up into her throat... now she knew how a horse felt when offered a new bit and bridle for the first time.’ Most women will know how accurate this is. Needless to say, this is a hilarious tale right to the very end, where the woman ends up ‘knickerless… a truly modern female’.

Ali Smith’s ‘The Child’ is also comic and surreal. A baby with the voice of an adult is placed in a woman’s supermarket trolley. It’s the reverse of a baby-snatching drama, and is both farcical and strangely daring. It was one of my favourites, and visits to the supermarket have not been the same since...

Elspeth Davie’s ‘Change of Face’ about a street artist is haunting as is her story ‘A Weight Problem’. The situations she describes seem to have been magicked from thin air.

Other stories are slightly more shocking: a death may take place, but the ‘loss’ is not, in itself, a focal point. It is perhaps more to do with learning. Margaret Atwood’s very clever story, ‘Betty’, is about this. Over a small number of pages, one gets a strong sense of the narrator’s identity, her stages of growing up and how she reinterprets the past in the light of her age and experience. It is full of wisdom.

Helen Simpson’s story ‘Ahead of the Pack’ is brief but brilliant. The central notion is that we should have a quota of carbon points each day (in the same way that people on diets allow themselves a certain number of calories). It is such a clever idea that I wondered if it should not become a reality. What better way to ensure that we do not get ‘in terms of [our] planetary profile... an absolutely vast arse’.

I happily included the slightly self-referential ‘A Society’ by Virginia Woolf, where the character of Poll is left a fortune by her father on condition that she reads all the books in the London Library. She declares them ‘for the most part unutterably bad!’ Having done most of my research for this anthology there, I can confirm that Poll is wrong.

I have had interesting discussions about whether there is a female ‘voice’ and whether women write differently from men. I believe there are some quintessentially feminine writers – and some whose writing provides no clues as to their identity. Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’, for example, is neither masculine nor feminine. It is simply one of the most powerful, imaginative and sensual pieces of writing that I have ever come across. If I did not have the knowledge, I would certainly not be able to identify that A. M. Homes’ stories are from a woman’s pen. Her male protagonists are totally convincing and their ‘voices’ provocative and disturbing.

Some stories are so vivid that it is hard to imagine them as anything other than autobiography – even when the writer is female and the narrator is male. ‘Before He Left the Family’ by Carrie Tiffany is a very matter-of-fact, no-blame narration of parental separation, but in subtle ways leaves the reader with little doubt over the effect this had on the sons. It is masterful storytelling. The male voice is very real.

I believe that many of the writers in this volume have the ability to leave their gender behind in their writing, whether through deliberately disguising themselves behind a male narrator, or adopting a masculine sensibility. Once again, this is something that would be more difficult to sustain over the duration of an entire novel.

Short stories seem ideally suited to how many of us are reading now. They are perfect to read on an iPad, even on a phone. They can last as long as a short bus or train journey. They are complete in themselves – though from time to time they leave us hanging in mid-air with some kind of twist or ambiguity, as if this story we have in our hands is merely a beginning.

This is a very personal selection of my favourite stories. There will definitely be omissions (some of them accidental, some of them deliberate). Many of these writers were suggested by friends and colleagues. It seems that everyone has a favourite writer of short stories – and whenever I mentioned to people what I was doing they all insisted that I must read one author or another. I always followed up on recommendations, but I did not always find that I shared their taste.

It’s been a glorious adventure putting this book together. I hope readers will share some of my excitement and enthusiasm and use it as a starting point for their own explorations into this extraordinary genre.

Victoria Hislop

September 2013

A Married Man’s Story

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand. After moving to England at nineteen, Mansfield secured her reputation as a writer with the story collection Bliss, published in 1920. She reached the height of her powers with her 1922 collection The Garden Party. Her last five years were shadowed by tuberculosis; she died from the disease at the age of thirty-four.

It is evening. Supper is over. We have left the small, cold dining room; we have come back to the sitting room where there is a fire. All is as usual. I am sitting at my writing table which is placed across a corner so that I am behind it, as it were, and facing the room. The lamp with the green shade is alight; I have before me two large books of reference, both open, a pile of papers.… All the paraphernalia, in fact, of an extremely occupied man. My wife, with our little boy on her lap, is in a low chair before the fire. She is about to put him to bed before she clears away the dishes and piles them up in the kitchen for the servant girl to-morrow morning. But the warmth, the quiet, and the sleepy baby have made her dreamy. One of his red woollen boots is off; one is on. She sits, bent forward, clasping the little bare foot, staring into the glow, and as the fire quickens, falls, flares again, her shadow – an immense Mother and Child – is here and gone again upon the wall.…

Outside it is raining. I like to think of that cold drenched window behind the blind, and beyond, the dark bushes in the garden, their broad leaves bright with rain, and beyond the fence, the gleaming road with the two hoarse little gutters singing against each other, and the wavering reflections of the lamps, like fishes’ tails.… While I am here, I am there, lifting my face to the dim sky, and it seems to me it must be raining all over the world – that the whole earth is drenched, is sounding with a soft quick patter or hard steady drumming, or gurgling and something that is like sobbing and laughing mingled together, and that light playful splashing that is of water falling into still lakes and flowing rivers. And all at one and the same moment I am arriving in a strange city, slipping under the hood of the cab while the driver whips the cover off the breathing horse, running from shelter to shelter, dodging someone, swerving by someone else. I am conscious of tall houses, their doors and shutters sealed against the night, of dripping balconies and sodden flower pots, I am brushing through deserted gardens and peering into moist smelling summer-houses (you know how soft and almost crumbling the wood of a summer-house is in the rain), I am standing on the dark quayside, giving my ticket into the wet red hand of the old sailor in an oilskin – How strong the sea smells! How loudly those tied-up boats knock against one another! I am crossing the wet stackyard, hooded in an old sack, carrying a lantern, while the house-dog, like a soaking doormat, springs, shakes himself over me. And now I am walking along a deserted road – it is impossible to miss the puddles and the trees are stirring – stirring.…

But one could go on with such a catalogue for ever – on and on – until one lifted the single arum lily leaf and discovered the tiny snails clinging, until one counted… and what then? Aren’t those just the signs, the traces of my feeling? The bright green streaks made by someone who walks over the dewy grass? Not the feeling itself. And as I think that, a mournful glorious voice begins to sing in my bosom. Yes, perhaps that is nearer what I mean. What a voice! What power! What velvety softness! Marvellous!

Suddenly my wife turns round quickly. She knows – how long has she known? – that I am not ‘working’! It is strange that with her full, open gaze, she should smile so timidly – and that she should say in such a hesitating voice: ‘What are you thinking?’

I smile and draw two fingers across my forehead in the way I have. ‘Nothing,’ I answer softly.

At that she stirs, and still trying not to make it sound important, she says: ‘Oh, but you must have been thinking of something!’

Then I really meet her gaze, meet it fully, and I fancy her face quivers. Will she never grow accustomed to these simple – one might say – everyday little lies? Will she never learn not to expose herself – or to build up defences?

‘Truly, I was thinking of nothing!’

There! I seem to see it dart at her. She turns away, pulls the other red sock off the baby – sits him up, and begins to unbutton him behind. I wonder if that little soft rolling bundle sees anything, feels anything? Now she turns him over on her knee, and in this light, his soft arms and legs waving, he is extraordinarily like a young crab. A queer thing is I can’t connect him with my wife and myself; I’ve never accepted him as ours. Each time when I come into the hall and see the perambulator, I catch myself thinking: ‘H’m, someone has brought a baby.’ Or, when his crying wakes me at night, I feel inclined to blame my wife for having brought the baby in from outside. The truth is, that though one might suspect her of strong maternal feelings, my wife doesn’t seem to me the type of woman who bears children in her own body. There’s an immense difference! Where is that… animal ease and playfulness, that quick kissing and cuddling one has been taught to expect of young mothers? She hasn’t a sign of it. I believe that when she ties its bonnet she feels like an aunt and not a mother. But of course I may be wrong; she may be passionately devoted.… I don’t think so. At any rate, isn’t it a trifle indecent to feel like this about one’s own wife? Indecent or not, one has these feelings. And one other thing. How can I reasonably expect my wife, a broken-hearted woman, to spend her time tossing the baby? But that is beside the mark. She never even began to toss when her heart was whole.

And now she has carried the baby to bed. I hear her soft deliberate steps moving between the dining room and the kitchen, there and back again, to the tune of the clattering dishes. And now all is quiet. What is happening now? Oh, I know just as surely as if I’d gone to see – she is standing in the middle of the kitchen, facing the rainy window. Her head is bent, with one finger she is tracing something – nothing – on the table. It is cold in the kitchen; the gas jumps; the tap drips; it’s a forlorn picture. And nobody is going to come behind her, to take her in his arms, to kiss her soft hair, to lead her to the fire and to rub her hands warm again. Nobody is going to call her or to wonder what she is doing out there. And she knows it. And yet, being a woman, deep down, deep down, she really does expect the miracle to happen; she really could embrace that dark, dark deceit, rather than live – like this.

To live like this… I write those words, very carefully, very beautifully. For some reason I feel inclined to sign them, or to write underneath – Trying a New Pen. But seriously, isn’t it staggering to think what may be contained in one innocent-looking little phrase? It tempts me – it tempts me terribly. Scene. The supper-table. My wife has just handed me my tea. I stir it, lift the spoon, idly chase and then carefully capture a speck of tea-leaf, and having brought it ashore, I murmur, quite gently, ‘How long shall we continue to live – like – this?’ And immediately there is that famous ‘blinding flash and deafening roar. Huge pieces of débris (I must say I like débris) are flung into the air… and when the dark clouds of smoke have drifted away… ’ But this will never happen; I shall never know it. It will be found upon me ‘intact’ as they say. ‘Open my heart and you will see… ’

Why? Ah, there you have me! There is the most difficult question of all to answer. Why do people stay together? Putting aside ‘for the sake of the children’, and ‘the habit of years’ and ‘economic reasons’ as lawyers’ nonsense – it’s not much more – if one really does try to find out why it is that people don’t leave each other, one discovers a mystery. It is because they can’t; they are bound. And nobody on earth knows what are the bands that bind them except those two. Am I being obscure? Well, the thing itself isn’t so frightfully crystal clear, is it? Let me put it like this. Supposing you are taken, absolutely, first into his confidence and then into hers. Supposing you know all there is to know about the situation. And having given it not only your deepest sympathy but your most honest impartial criticism, you declare, very calmly (but not without the slightest suggestion of relish – for there is – I swear there is – in the very best of us – something that leaps up and cries ‘A-ahh!’ for joy at the thought of destroying), ‘Well, my opinion is that you two people ought to part. You’ll do no earthly good together. Indeed, it seems to me, it’s the duty of either to set the other free.’ What happens then? He – and she – agree. It is their conviction too. You are only saying what they have been thinking all last night. And away they go to act on your advice, immediately… And the next time you hear of them they are still together. You see – you’ve reckoned without the unknown quantity – which is their secret relation to each other – and that they can’t disclose even if they want to. Thus far you may tell and no further. Oh, don’t misunderstand me! It need not necessarily have anything to do with their sleeping together… But this brings me to a thought I’ve often half entertained. Which is, that human beings, as we know them, don’t choose each other at all. It is the owner, the second self inhabiting them, who makes the choice for his own particular purposes, and – this may sound absurdly far-fetched – it’s the second self in the other which responds. Dimly – dimly – or so it has seemed to me – we realise this, at any rate to the extent that we realise the hopelessness of trying to escape. So that, what it all amounts to is – if the impermanent selves of my wife and me are happy – tant mieux pour nous – if miserable – tant pis.… But I don’t know, I don’t know. And it may be that it’s something entirely individual in me – this sensation (yes, it is even a sensation) of how extraordinarily shell-like we are as we are – little creatures, peering out of the sentry-box at the gate, ogling through our glass case at the entry, wan little servants, who never can say for certain, even, if the master is out or in…

The door opens… My wife. She says: ‘I am going to bed.’

And I look up vaguely, and vaguely say: ‘You are going to bed.’

‘Yes.’ A tiny pause. ‘Don’t forget – will you? – to turn out the gas in the hall.’

And again I repeat: ‘The gas in the hall.’

There was a time – the time before – when this habit of mine (it really has become a habit now – it wasn’t one then) was one of our sweetest jokes together. It began, of course, when, on several occasions, I really was deeply engaged and I didn’t hear. I emerged only to see her shaking her head and laughing at me, ‘You haven’t heard a word!’

‘No. What did you say?’

Why should she think that so funny and charming? She did; it delighted her. ‘Oh, my darling, it’s so like you! It’s so – so – .’ And I knew she loved me for it – knew she positively looked forward to coming in and disturbing me, and so – as one does – I played up. I was guaranteed to be wrapped away every evening at 10.30 p.m. But now? For some reason I feel it would be crude to stop my performance. It’s simplest to play on. But what is she waiting for to-night? Why doesn’t she go? Why prolong this? She is going. No, her hand on the door-knob, she turns round again, and she says in the most curious, small, breathless voice, ‘You’re not cold?’

Oh, it’s not fair to be as pathetic as that! That was simply damnable, I shudder all over before I manage to bring out a slow ‘No-o,’ while my left hand ruffles the reference pages.

She is gone; she will not come back again to-night. It is not only I who recognise that; the room changes, too. It relaxes, like an old actor. Slowly the mask is rubbed off; the look of strained attention changes to an air of heavy, sullen brooding. Every line, every fold breathes fatigue. The mirror is quenched; the ash whitens; only my shy lamp burns on… But what a cynical indifference to me it all shows! Or should I perhaps be flattered? No, we understand each other. You know those stories of little children who are suckled by wolves and accepted by the tribe, and how for ever after they move freely among their fleet grey brothers? Something like that has happened to me. But wait – that about the wolves won’t do. Curious!

Before I wrote it down, while it was still in my head, I was delighted with it. It seemed to express, and more, to suggest, just what I wanted to say. But written, I can smell the falseness immediately and the... source of the smell is in that word fleet. Don’t you agree? Fleet, grey brothers! ‘Fleet.’ A word I never use. When I wrote ‘wolves’ it skimmed across my mind like a shadow and I couldn’t resist it. Tell me! Tell me! Why is it so difficult to write simply – and not only simply but sotto voce, if you know what I mean? That is how I long to write. No fine effects – no bravuras. But just the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it.

I light a cigarette, lean back, inhale deeply – and find myself wondering if my wife is asleep. Or is she lying in her cold bed, staring into the dark with those trustful, bewildered eyes? Her eyes are like the eyes of a cow being driven along a road. ‘Why am I being driven – what harm have I done? But I really am not responsible for that look; it’s her natural expression. One day, when she was turning out a cupboard, she found a little old photograph of herself, taken when she was a girl at school. In her confirmation dress, she explained. And there were the eyes, even then. I remember saying to her: ‘Did you always look so sad?’ Leaning over my shoulder, she laughed lightly. ‘Do I look sad? I think it’s just... me.’ And she waited for me to say something about it. But I was marvelling at her courage at having shown it to me at all. It was a hideous photograph! And I wondered again if she realised how plain she was, and comforted herself with the idea that people who loved each other didn’t criticise but accepted everything, or if she really rather liked her appearance and expected me to say something complimentary. Oh, that was base of me! How could I have forgotten all the countless times when I have known her turn away, avoid the light, press her face into my shoulders. And above all, how could I have forgotten the afternoon of our wedding day, when we sat on the green bench in the Botanical Gardens and listened to the band, how, in an interval between two pieces, she suddenly turned to me and said in the voice in which one says: ‘Do you think the grass is damp?’ or ‘Do you think it’s time for tea?’... ‘Tell me – do you think physical beauty is so very important?’ I don’t like to think how often she rehearsed that question. And do you know what I answered? At that moment, as if at my command, there came a great gush of hard bright sound from the band. And I managed to shout above it – cheerfully – ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’ Devilish! Wasn’t it? Perhaps not wholly. She looked like the poor patient who hears the surgeon say, ‘It will certainly be necessary to perform the operation – but not now!’

But all this conveys the impression that my wife and I were never really happy together. Not true! Not true! We were marvellously, radiantly happy. We were a model couple. If you had seen us together, any time, any place, if you had followed us, tracked us down, spied, taken us off our guard, you still would have been forced to confess, ‘I have never seen a more ideally suited pair.’ Until last autumn.

But really to explain what happened then I should have to go back and back, I should have to dwindle until my tiny hands clutched the bannisters, the stair-rail was higher than my head, and I peered through to watch my father padding softly up and down. There were coloured windows on the landings. As he came up, first his bald head was scarlet; then it was yellow. How frightened I was! And when they put me to bed, it was to dream that we were living inside one of my father’s big coloured bottles. For he was a chemist. I was born nine years after my parents were married; I was an only child, and the effort to produce even me – small, withered bud I must have been – sapped all my mother’s strength. She never left her room again. Bed, sofa, window, she moved between the three. Well I can see her, on the window days, sitting, her cheek in her hand, staring out. Her room looked over the street. Opposite there was a wall plastered with advertisement for travelling shows and circuses and so on. I stand beside her, and we gaze at the slim lady in a red dress hitting a dark gentleman over the head with her parasol, or at the tiger peering through the jungle while the clown, close by, balances a bottle on his nose, or at a little golden-haired girl sitting on the knee of an old black man in a broad cotton hat... She says nothing. On sofa days there is a flannel dressing-gown that I loathe, and a cushion that keeps on slipping off the hard sofa. I pick it up. It has flowers and writing sewn on. I ask what the writing says, and she whispers, ‘Sweet Repose!’ In bed her fingers plait, in tight little plaits, the fringe of the quilt, and her lips are thin. And that is all there is of my mother, except the last queer ‘episode’ that comes later...

My father – curled up in the corner on the lid of a round box that held sponges, I stared at my father so long it’s as though his image, cut off at the waist by the counter, has remained solid in my memory. Perfectly bald, polished head, shaped like a thin egg, creased creamy cheeks, little bags under the eyes, large pale ears like handles. His manner was discreet, sly, faintly amused and tinged with impudence. Long before I could appreciate it I knew the mixture… I even used to copy him in my corner, bending forward, with a small reproduction of his faint sneer. In the evening his customers were, chiefly, young women; some of them came in every day for his famous five-penny pick-me-up. Their gaudy looks, their voices, their free ways, fascinated me. I longed to be my father, handing them across the counter the little glass of bluish stuff they tossed off so greedily. God knows what it was made of. Years after I drank some, just to see what it tasted like, and I felt as though someone had given me a terrific blow on the head; I felt stunned. One of those evenings I remember vividly. It was cold; it must have been autumn, for the flaring gas was lighted after my tea. I sat in my corner and my father was mixing something; the shop was empty. Suddenly the bell jangled and a young woman rushed in, crying so loud, sobbing so hard, that it didn’t sound real. She wore a green cape trimmed with fur and a hat with cherries dangling. My father came from behind the screen. But she couldn’t stop herself at first. She stood in the middle of the shop and wrung her hands, and moaned. I’ve never heard such crying since. Presently she managed to gasp out, ‘Give me a pick-me-up.’ Then she drew a long breath, trembled away from him and quavered: ‘I’ve had bad news!’ And in the flaring gaslight I saw the whole side of her face was puffed up and purple; her lip was cut, and her eyelid looked as though it was gummed fast over the wet eye. My father pushed the glass across the counter, and she took her purse out of her stocking and paid him. But she couldn’t drink; clutching the glass, she stared in front of her as if she could not believe what she saw. Each time she put her head back the tears spurted out again. Finally she put the glass down. It was no use. Holding the cape with one hand, she ran in the same way out of the shop again. My father gave no sign. But long after she had gone I crouched in my corner, and when I think back it’s as though I felt my whole body vibrating – ‘So that’s what it is outside,’ I thought. ‘That’s what it’s like out there.’

Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvellous accounts by writers who declare that they remember ‘everything, everything’. I certainly don’t. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard. Now and again, when the sun shone, a careless hand thrust me out on to the window-sill, and a careless hand whipped me in again – and that was all. But what happened in the darkness – I wonder? Did one grow? Pale stem… timid leaves… white, reluctant bud. No wonder I was hated at school. Even the masters shrank from me. I somehow knew that my soft hesitating voice disgusted them. I knew, too, how they turned away from my shocked, staring eyes. I was small and thin, and I smelled of the shop; my nickname was Gregory Powder. School was a tin building stuck on the raw hillside. There were dark red streaks like blood in the oozing clay banks of the playground. I hide in the dark passage, where the coats hang, and am discovered there by one of the masters. ‘What are you doing there in the dark?’ His terrible voice kills me; I die before his eyes. I am standing in a ring of thrust-out heads; some are grinning, some look greedy, some are spitting. And it is always cold. Big crushed up clouds press across the sky; the rusty water in the school tank is frozen; the bell sounds numb. One day they put a dead bird in my overcoat pocket. I found it just when I reached home. Oh, what a strange flutter there was at my heart, when I drew out that terribly soft, cold little body, with the legs thin as pins and the claws wrung. I sat on the back door step in the yard and put the bird in my cap. The feathers round the neck looked wet and there was a tiny tuft just above the closed eyes that stood up too. How tightly the beak was shut; I could not see the mark where it was divided. I stretched out one wing and touched the soft, secret down underneath; I tried to make the claws curl round my little finger. But I didn’t feel sorry for it – no! I wondered. The smoke from our kitchen chimney poured downwards, and flakes of soot floated – soft, light in the air. Through a big crack in the cement yard a poor-looking plant with dull reddish flowers had pushed its way. I looked at the dead bird again… And that is the first time that I remember singing, rather… listening to a silent voice inside a little cage that was me.

But what has all this to do with my married happiness? How can all this affect my wife and me? Why – to tell what happened last autumn – do I run all this way back into the Past? The Past – what is the Past? I might say the star-shaped flake of soot on a leaf of the poor-looking plant, and the bird lying on the quilted lining of my cap, and my father’s pestle and my mother’s cushion, belong to it. But that is not to say they are any less mine than they were when I looked upon them with my very eyes, and touched them with these fingers. No, they are more; they are a living part of me. Who am I, in fact, as I sit here at this table, but my own past? If I deny that, I am nothing. And if I were to try and divide my life into childhood, youth, early manhood and so on, it would be a kind of affectation; I should know I was doing it just because of the pleasantly important sensation it gives one to rule lines, and to use green ink for childhood, red for the next stage, and purple for the period of adolescence. For, one thing I have learnt, one thing I do believe is, Nothing Happens Suddenly. Yes, that is my religion, I suppose…

My mother’s death, for instance. Is it more distant from me to-day than it was then? It is just as close, as strange, as puzzling, and in spite of all the countless times I have recalled the circumstances, I know no more now than I did then whether I dreamed them or whether they really occurred. It happened when I was thirteen and I slept in a little strip of a room on what was called the Half Landing. One night I woke up with a start to see my mother, in her nightgown, without even the hated flannel dressing-gown, sitting on my bed. But the strange thing which frightened me was, she wasn’t looking at me. Her head was bent; the short thin tail of hair lay between her shoulders; her hands were pressed between her knees, and my bed shook; she was shivering. It was the first time I had ever seen her out of her own room. I said, or I think I said, ‘Is that you, mother?’ And as she turned round I saw in the moonlight how queer she looked. Her face looked small – quite different. She looked like one of the boys at the school baths, who sits on a step, shivering just like that, and wants to go in and yet is frightened.

‘Are you awake?’‘’’‘’’’’–