The Complete Short Stories

  My uncle died this way: he was sitting on the bank of the river, playing a fish. As the afternoon faded a man passed by, and then a young couple who made pottery passed him. As they said later, he was sitting peacefully awaiting the catch and of course they didn’t disturb him. As night fell the colonel and his wife passed by; they were on their way home from their daily walk. They knew it was too late for my uncle to be simply sitting there, so they went to look. He had been dead, the doctor pronounced, from two to two and a half hours. The fish was still struggling with the bait. It was a mild heart attack. Everything my uncle did was mild, so different from everything he wrote. Yet perhaps not so different. He was supposed to be ‘far out’, so one didn’t know what went on out there. Besides, he had not long returned from a trip to London. They say, still waters run deep.

  But far out was how he saw himself. He once said that if you could imagine modern literature as a painting, perhaps by Brueghel the Elder, the people and the action were in the foreground, full of colour, eating, stealing, copulating, laughing, courting each other, excreting, and stabbing each other, selling things, climbing trees. Then in the distance, at the far end of a vast plain, there he would be, a speck on the horizon, always receding and always there, and always a necessary and mysterious component of the picture; always there and never to be taken away, essential to the picture — a speck in the distance, which if you were to blow up the detail would simply be a vague figure, plodding on the other way.

  I am no fool, and he knew it. He didn’t know it at first, but he had seven months in which to learn that fact. I gave up my job in Edinburgh in the government office, a job with a pension, to come here to the lonely house among the Pentland Hills to live with him and take care of things. I think he imagined I was going to be another Elaine when he suggested the arrangement. He had no idea how much better I was for him than Elaine. Elaine was his mistress, that is the stark truth. ‘My common-law wife,’ he called her, explaining that in Scotland, by tradition, the woman you are living with is your wife. As if I didn’t know all that nineteenth-century folklore; and it’s long died out. Nowadays you have to do more than say ‘I marry you, I marry you, I marry you,’ to make a woman your wife. Of course, my uncle was a genius and a character. I allowed for that. Anyway, Elaine died and I came here a month later. Within a month I had cleared up the best part of the disorder. He called me a Scottish puritan girl, and at forty-one it was nice to be a girl and I wasn’t against the Scottish puritanical attribution either since I am proud to be a Scot; I feel nationalistic about it. He always had that smile of his when he said it, so I don’t know how he meant it. They say he had that smile of his when he was found dead, fishing.

  ‘I appoint my niece Susan Kyle to be my sole literary executor.’ I don’t wonder he decided on this course after I had been with him for three months. Probably for the first time in his life all his papers were in order. I went into Edinburgh and bought box-files and cover-files and I filed away all that mountain of papers, each under its separate heading. And I knew what was what. You didn’t catch me filing away a letter from Angus Wilson or Saul Bellow in the same place as an ordinary ‘W’ or ‘B’, a Miss Mary Whitelaw or a Mrs Jonathan Brown. I knew the value of these letters, they went into a famous-persons file, bulging and of value. So that in a short time my uncle said, ‘There’s little for me to do now, Susan, but die.’ Which I thought was melodramatic, and said so. But I could see he was forced to admire my good sense. He said, ‘You remind me of my mother, who prepared her shroud all ready for her funeral.’ His mother was my grandmother Janet Kyle. Why shouldn’t she have sat and sewn her shroud? People in those days had very little to do, and here I was running the house and looking after my uncle’s papers with only the help of Mrs Donaldson three mornings a week, where my grandmother had four pairs of hands for indoor help and three out. The rest of the family never went near the house after my grandmother died, for Elaine was always there with my uncle.

  The property was distributed among the family, but I was the sole literary executor. And it was up to me to do what I liked with his literary remains. It was a good thing I had everything inventoried and filed, ready for sale. They came and took the total archive as they called it away, all the correspondence and manuscripts except one. That one I kept for myself. It was the novel he was writing when he died, an unfinished manuscript. I thought, Why not? Maybe I will finish it myself and publish it. I am no fool, and my uncle must have known how the book was going to end. I never read any of his correspondence, mind you; I was too busy those months filing it all in order. I did think, however, that I would read this manuscript and perhaps put an ending to it. There were already ten chapters. My uncle had told me there was only another chapter to go. So I said nothing to the Foundation about that one unfinished manuscript; I was only too glad when they had come and gone, and the papers were out of the house. I got the painters in to clean the study. Mrs Donaldson said she had never seen the house looking so like a house should be.

  Under my uncle’s will I inherited the house, and I planned eventually to rent rooms to tourists in the summer, bed and breakfast. In the meantime I set about reading the unfinished manuscript, for it was only April, and I’m not a one to let the grass grow under my feet. I had learnt to decipher that old-fashioned handwriting of his which looked good on the page but was not too clear. My uncle had a treasure in me those last months of his life, although he said I was like a book without an index —all information, and no way of getting at it. I asked him to tell me what information he ever got out of Elaine, who never passed an exam in her life.

  This last work of my uncle’s was an unusual story for him, set in the seventeenth century here among the Pentland Hills. He had told me only that he was writing something strong and cruel, and that this was easier to accomplish in a historical novel. It was about the slow identification and final trapping of a witch, and I could see as I read it that he hadn’t been joking when he said it was strong and cruel; he had often said things to frighten and alarm me, I don’t know why. By chapter ten the trial of the witch in Edinburgh was only halfway through. Her fate depended entirely on chapter eleven, and on the negotiations that were being conducted behind the scenes by the opposing factions of intrigue. My uncle had left a pile of notes he had accumulated towards this novel, and I retained these along with the manuscript. But there was no sign in the notes as to how my uncle had decided to resolve the fate of the witch — whose name was Edith but that is by the way. I put the notebooks and papers away, for there were many other things to be done following the death of my famous uncle. The novel itself was written by hand in twelve notebooks. In the twelfth only the first two pages had been filled, the rest of the pages were blank, I am sure of this. The two filled pages came to the end of chapter ten. At the top of the next page was written ‘Chapter Eleven’. I looked through the rest of the notebook to make sure my uncle had not made some note there on how he intended to continue; all blank, I am sure of it. I put the twelve notebooks, together with the sheaf of loose notes, in a drawer of the solid-mahogany dining-room sideboard.

  A few weeks later I brought the notebooks out again, intending to consider how I might proceed with the completion of the book and so enhance its value. I read again through chapter ten; then, when I turned to the page where ‘Chapter Eleven’ was written, there in my uncle’s handwriting was the following:

  Well, Susan, how do you feel about finishing my novel? Aren’t you a greedy little snoot, holding back my unfinished work, when you know the Foundation paid for the lot? What about your puritanical principles? Elaine and I are waiting to see how you manage to write Chapter Eleven. Elaine asks me to add it’s lovely to see you scouring and cleaning those neglected corners of the house. But don’t you know, Jaimie is having you on. Where does he go after lunch?

  — Your affect Uncle

  I could hardly believe my eyes. The first shock I got was the bit about Jaimie, and then came the second shock, that the words were
there at all. It was twelve-thirty at night and Jaimie had gone home. Jaimie Donaldson is the son of Mrs Donaldson, and it isn’t his fault he’s out of work. We have had experiences together, but nobody is to know that, least of all Mrs Donaldson who introduced him into the household merely to clean the windows and stoke the boiler. But the words? Where did they come from?

  It is a lonely house, here in a fold of the Pentlands, surrounded by woods, five miles to the nearest cottage, six to Mrs Donaldson’s, and the buses stop at ten p.m. I felt a great fear there in the dining-room, with the twelve notebooks on the table, and the pile of papers, a great cold, and a panic. I ran to the hall and lifted the telephone but didn’t know how to explain myself or whom to phone. My story would sound like that of a woman gone crazy. Mrs Donaldson? The police? I couldn’t think what to say to them at that hour of night. ‘I have found some words that weren’t there before in my uncle’s manuscript, and in his own hand.’ It was unthinkable. Then I thought perhaps someone had played me a trick. Oh no, I knew that this couldn’t be. Only Mrs Donaldson had been in the dining-room, and only to dust, with me to help her. Jaimie had no chance to go there, not at all. I never used the dining-room now and had meals in the kitchen. But in fact I knew it wasn’t them, it was Uncle. I wished with all my heart that I was a strong woman, as I had always felt I was, strong and sensible. I stood in the hall by the telephone, shaking. ‘O God, everlasting and almighty,’ I prayed, ‘make me strong, and guide and lead me as to how Mrs Thatcher would conduct herself in circumstances of this nature.

  I didn’t sleep all night. I sat in the big kitchen stoking up the fire. Only once I moved, to go back into the dining-room and make sure that those words were there. Beyond a doubt they were, and in my uncle’s handwriting — that handwriting it would take an expert forger to copy. I put the manuscript back in the drawer; I locked the dining-room door and took the key. My uncle’s study, now absolutely empty, was above the kitchen. If he was haunting the house, I heard no sound from there or from anywhere else. It was a fearful night, waiting there by the fire.

  Mrs Donaldson arrived in the morning, complaining that Jaimie was getting lazy; he wouldn’t rise. Too many late nights.

  ‘Where does he go after lunch?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, he goes for a round of golf after his dinner,’ she said. ‘He’s always ready for a round of golf no matter what else there is to do. Golf is the curse of Scotland.’

  I had a good idea who Jaimie was meeting on the golf course, and I could almost have been grateful to Uncle for pointing out to me in that sly way of his that Jaimie wandered in the hours after the midday meal which we called lunch and they called their dinner. By five o’clock in the afternoon Jaimie would come here to the house to fetch up the coal, bank the fire, and so forth. But all afternoon he would be on the links with that girl who works at the manse, Greta, younger sister of Elaine, the one who moved in here openly, ruining my uncle’s morals, leaving the house to rot. I always suspected that family. After Elaine died it came out he had even introduced her to all his friends; I could tell from the letters of condolence, how they said things like ‘He never got over the loss of Elaine’ and ‘He couldn’t live without her’. And sometimes he called me Elaine by mistake. I was furious. Once, for example, I said, ‘Uncle, stop pacing about down here. Go up to your study and do your scribbling; I’ll bring you a cup of cocoa.’ He said, with that glaze-eyed look he always had when he was interrupted in his thoughts, ‘What’s come over you, Elaine?’ I said, ‘I’m not Elaine, thank you very much.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ he said, ‘you are not Elaine, you are most certainly not her.’ If the public that read his books by the tens of thousands could have seen behind the scenes, I often wondered what they would have thought. I told him so many a time, but he smiled in that sly way, that smile he still had on his face when they found him fishing and stone dead.

  After Mrs Donaldson left the house, at noon, I went up to my bedroom, half dropping from lack of sleep. Mrs Donaldson hadn’t noticed anything; you could be falling down dead — they never look at you. I slept till four. It was still light. I got up and locked the doors, front and back. I pulled the curtains shut, and when Jaimie rang the bell at five o’clock I didn’t open, I just let him ring. Eventually he went away. I expect he had plenty to wonder about. But I wasn’t going to make him welcome before the fire and get him his supper, and take off my clothes there in the back room on the divan with him, in front of the television, while Uncle and Elaine were looking on, even though it is only Nature. No, I turned on the television for myself. You would never believe, it was a programme on the Scottish BBC about Uncle. I switched to TV One, and got a quiz show. And I felt hungry, for I’d eaten nothing since the night before.

  But I couldn’t face any supper until I had assured myself about that manuscript. I was fairly certain by now that it was a dream. ‘Maybe I’ve been overworking,’ I thought to myself. I had the key of the dining-room in my pocket and I took it and opened the door; I closed the curtains, and I went to the drawer and took out the notebook.

  Not only were the words that I had read last night there, new words were added, a whole paragraph:

  Look up the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 5, verses 1 to 10. See what happened to Ananias and Sapphira his wife. You’re not getting on very fast with your scribbling, are you, Susan? Elaine and I were under the impression you were going to write Chapter Eleven. Why don’t you take a cup of cocoa and get on with it? First read Acts, V, 1—10.

  — Your affec Uncle

  Well, I shoved the book in the drawer and looked round the dining-room. I looked under the table and behind the curtains. It didn’t look as if anything had been touched. I got out of the room and locked the door, I don’t know how. I went to fetch my Bible, praying, ‘O God omnipotent and all-seeing, direct and instruct me as to the way out of this situation, astonishing as it must appear to Thee.’ I looked up the passage:

  But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession.

  And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

  But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the land?

  I didn’t read any more because I knew how it went on. Ananias and Sapphira, his wife, were both struck dead for holding back the portion of the sale for themselves. This was Uncle getting at me for holding back his manuscript from the Foundation. That’s an impudence, I thought, to make such a comparison from the Bible, when he was an open and avowed sinner himself.

  I thought it all over for a while. Then I went into the dining-room and got out that last notebook. Something else had been written since I had put it away, not half an hour before:

  Why don’t you get on with Chapter Eleven? We’re waiting for it.

  I tore out the page, put the book away and locked the door. I took the page to the fire and put it on to burn. Then I went to bed.

  This went on for a month. My uncle always started the page afresh with ‘Chapter Eleven’, followed by a new message. He even went so far as to put in that I had kept back bits of the housekeeping money, although, he wrote, I was well paid enough. That’s a matter of opinion, and who did the economising, anyway? Always, after reading Uncle’s disrespectful comments, I burned the page, and we were getting near the end of the notebook. He would say things to show he followed me round the house, and even knew my dreams. When I went into Edinburgh for some shopping he knew exactly where I had been and what I’d bought. He and Elaine listened in to my conversations on the telephone if I rang up an old friend. I didn’t let anyone in the house except Mrs Donaldson. No more Jaimie. He even knew if I took a dose of salts and how long I had sat in the bathroom, the awful old man.

  Mrs Donaldson one morning said she was leaving. She said to me, ‘Why don’t you see a doctor?’ I said, ‘Why?’ But she wouldn’t speak.

  One day soon
afterwards a man rang me up from the Foundation. They didn’t want to bother me, they said, but they were rather puzzled. They had found in Uncle’s letters many references to a novel. The Witch of the Pentlands, which he had been writing just before his death; and they had found among the papers a final chapter to this novel, which he had evidently written on loose pages on a train, for a letter of his, kindly provided by one of his many correspondents, proved this. Only they had no idea where the rest of the manuscript could be. In the end the witch Edith is condemned to be burned, but dies of her own will power before the execution, he said, but there must be ten more chapters leading up to it. This was Uncle’s most metaphysical work, and based on a true history, the man said, and he must stress that it was very important.

  I said that I would have a look. I rang back that afternoon and said I had found the whole book in a drawer in the dining-room.

  So the man came to get it. On the phone he sounded very suspicious, in case there were more manuscripts. ‘Are you sure that’s everything? You know, the Foundation’s price included the whole archive. No, don’t trust it to the mail, I’ll be there tomorrow at two.

  Just before he arrived I took a good drink, whisky and soda, as, indeed, I had been taking from sheer need all the past month. I had brought out the notebooks. On the blank page was written:

  Goodbye, Susan. It’s lovely being a speck in the distance.

  Your affec Uncle

  Another Pair of Hands

  I am the only son of parents old enough to be grandparents. This has advantages and disadvantages, for although I was out of touch with the intervening generation, my mother’s friends when I was born being forty and upwards and my father’s contemporaries mostly over sixty, I inherited a longer sense of living history than most people do. It was quite natural for my elders to talk about the life of the early part of the century to which they belonged, and I grew up knowing instinctively how things were done in those days and how they thought.