The Collected Stories

  Their son was dreaming now: he was there, on the bank of the river. Birds with blue plumage swooped over the water; through the foliage came the strum of a guitar. All the friends there’d been were there, in different coloured sleeping-bags, lying as he was. They were happy by the river because India was where the truth was, wrapped up in gentleness and beauty. Someone said that, and everyone else agreed.

  Anthea Chalmers was at the Morrishes’, tall and elegant in green, long since divorced. She had a look of Bette Davis, eyes like soup-plates, that kind of mouth. The Livingstons were there also, and Susanna and David Maidstone, and the Unwins. So was Mr Fulmer, a sandy-complexioned man whom people were sorry for because his wife was a stick-in-the-mud and wouldn’t go to parties. June and Tom Highband were there, and the Taylor-Deeths, and Marcus Stire and his friend. There was a handful of faces that were unfamiliar to Jessica and Malcolm.

  ‘Hullo, hullo,’ their host called out, welcoming them with party joviality. The guests were passing from the sitting-room, through the french windows to the garden, all of them with glasses in their hands. The Morrishes – he pink and bluff, she pretty in a faded way – were busily making certain that these glasses contained precisely what people wanted. In the garden their French au pair boy was handing round bowls of nuts and shiny little biscuits from Japan. Children – the Morrishes’ and others’ – had congregated in a distant corner, by a tool-shed.

  Jessica and Malcolm both asked for white wine, since chilled bottles of it stood there, inviting on a warm morning. They didn’t say much to the Morrishes, who clearly wanted to get things going before indulging in chat. They stepped out into the garden, where a mass of flowers spectacularly bloomed and the lawns were closely shorn.

  ‘Hi, Jessica,’ Marcus Stire’s friend said, a short, stout young man in a blue blazer. He’d made her black-bottom pie, he reported. He shook his head, implying disappointment with his version of the dish.

  ‘Hullo, stranger,’ Anthea Chalmers said to Malcolm.

  She always seemed to pick him out. Ages ago he’d rejected the idea that a balding solicitor with glasses might possibly have some sensual attraction for her, even though all she ever talked to him about were sensual matters. She liked to get him into a corner, as she had done now, and had a way of turning interlopers away with a snakelike shift of her shoulders. She’d placed him with his back to the wall of the house, along which a creamy honeysuckle had been trained. A trellis to his right continued to support it; to his left, two old water-butts were swathed with purple clematis.

  ‘A pig,’ she said, referring to the man she’d once been married to. ‘And I told him, Malcolm. I’d sooner share a bed with a farmyard pig was precisely what I said. Needless to say, he became violent.’

  Jessica, having discussed the preparation of black-bottom pie with Marcus Stire’s friend, smiled at the stout young man and passed on. The au pair boy offered her a Japanese biscuit and then a man she didn’t know remarked upon the weather. Could anything be nicer, he asked her, than a drink or two on a Sunday morning in a sunny London garden? He was a man in brown suede, expensively cut to disguise a certain paunchiness. He had damp eyes and a damp-looking moustache. He had well-packed jowls, and a sun-browned head that matched the shade of his clothes. A businessman, Jessica speculated, excessively rich, a tough performer in his business world. He began to talk about a house he owned near Estepona.

  *

  On the surface of the tea which Jessica had earlier brought her son a skin had formed, in which a small fly now struggled. Nothing else was happening in the room. The sound of breathing could hardly be heard, the dream about birds with blue plumage had abruptly ceased. Then – in that same abrupt manner, a repetition of the suddenness that in different ways affected this boy’s life – his eyes snapped open.

  Through the gloom, and seeming larger than reality, the Spitfires and the Heinkels greeted his consciousness. He was in a room with aeroplanes, he told himself, and while he lay there nothing more impinged on his mind. Eventually he rose and began to dress, his youthful beard scanty and soft, quite like a bearded lady’s. Tears ran into it while slowly he pulled his clothes over his white flesh.

  His T-shirt was pale blue, the paler message it bore almost washed away. Wham! it had said, the word noisily proclaimed against lightning flashes and the hooded figures of Batman and Robin. A joke all of it had been: those years had been full of jokes, with no one wanting to grow up, with that longing to be children for ever. Tears dripped from his beard to the T-shirt now; some fell on to his jeans. He turned the electric light on and then noticed the cup of tea by his bed. He drank it, swallowing the skin and the fly that had died in it. His tears did not distress him.

  ‘Well, that was it, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said. ‘I mean, no one enjoys a bedroom more than I do, but for God’s sake!’

  Her soup-plate eyes rapidly blinked, her lips were held for a moment in a little knot. The man she’d married, she yet again revealed, had not been able to give her what she’d wanted and needed. Instead, intoxicated, he would return to their house at night and roar about from room to room. Often he armed himself with a bamboo cane. ‘Which he bought,’ she reminded Malcolm, ‘quite openly in a garden shop.’

  In the honeysuckle, suburban bees paused between moments of buzzing. A white butterfly fluttered beside Malcolm’s face. ‘You must be awfully glad to be rid of him,’ he politely said.

  ‘One’s alone, Malcolm. It isn’t easy, being alone.’

  She went into details about how difficult it was, and how various frustrations could be eased. She lowered her voice, she said she spoke in confidence. Sexual fantasy flooded from her, tired arid seeming soiled in the bright sunshine, with the scent of the honeysuckle so close to both of them. Malcolm listened, not moving away, not trying to think of other things. It was nearly two years since Anthea Chalmers had discovered that he would always listen at a party.

  In the garden the voices had become louder as more alcohol was consumed. Laughter was shriller, cigarette smoke hung about. By the tool-shed in the far distance the children, organized by a girl who was a little older than the others, played a variation of Grandmother’s Footsteps.

  Tom Highband, who wrote under another name a column for the Daily Telegraph, told a joke that caused a burst of laughter. Sandy Mr Fulmer, whom nobody knew very well, listened to the Unwins exchanging gossip with Susanna Maidstone about the school their children all attended. ‘Just a little slower,’ Marcus Stire’s friend pleaded, writing down a recipe for prune jelly on the back of a cheque-book. Taylor-Deeth was getting drunk.

  ‘It has its own little beach of course,’ the man with the damp-looking moustache informed Jessica. You went down a flight of steps and there you were. They adored the Spaniards, he added, Joan especially did.

  And then Joan, who was his wife, was there beside them, in shades of pink. She was bulky, like her husband, with a smile so widely beaming that it seemed to run off her face into her greying hair. She had always had a thing about the Spanish, she agreed, the quality of Spanish life, their little churches. ‘We have a maid of course,’ her husband said, ‘who keeps an eye on things. Old Violetta.’

  Glasses were again refilled, the Morrishes together attending to that, as was their way at their parties. She did so quietly, he with more dash. People often remarked that they were like good servants, the way they complemented one another in this way. As well, they were said to be happily married.

  Glancing between the couple who were talking to her, Jessica could see that Malcolm was still trapped. The Livingstons tried to cut in on the tête-à-tête but Anthea Chalmers’s shoulder sharply edged them away. Togethei: again after their separation, the Livingstons looked miserable.

  ‘Violetta mothers us,’ the man with the damp moustache said. ‘We could never manage without old Violetta.’

  ‘Another thing is Spanish dignity,’ his wife continued, and the man added that old Violetta certainly had her share of that.

&
nbsp; ‘Oh yes, indeed,’ his wife agreed.

  Marcus Stire arrived then, lanky and malicious. The couple with the house in Spain immediately moved away, as if they didn’t like the look of him. He laughed. They were embarrassed, he explained, because at another party recently they’d all of a sudden quarrelled most violently in his presence. The man had even raised an arm to strike his wife, and Marcus Stire had had to restrain him.

  ‘You’d never think it, would you, Jessica? All that guff about cosiness in Spain when more likely that smile of hers covers a multitude of sins.

  What awful frauds people are!’ He laughed again and then continued, his soft voice drawling, a cigarette between the rings on his fingers.

  He ran through all the people in the garden. Susanna Maidstone had been seen with Taylor-Deeth in the Trat-West. The Livingstons’ patched-up arrangement wouldn’t of course last. The Unwins were edgy, frigidity was Anthea Chalmers’s problem. ‘Suburban middle age,’ he said in his drawl. ‘It’s like a minefield.’ The Morrishes had had a ghastly upset a month ago when a girl from his office had pursued him home one night, messily spilling the beans.

  Jessica looked at the Morrishes, so neatly together as they saw to people’s drinks, attending now to Mr Fulmer. It seemed astonishing that they, too, weren’t quite as they appeared to be. ‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Marcus Stire said, guessing at this doubt in her mind.

  His malice was perceptive, and he didn’t much exaggerate. He had a way of detecting trouble, and of accurately piecing together the fragments that came his way. Caught off her guard, she wondered what he said to other people about Malcolm and herself. She wondered just how he saw them and then immediately struggled to regain her concentration, knowing she should not wonder that.

  He was commenting now on the girl who had persuaded the other children to play her version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, a bossy handful he called her. How dreadful she’d be at forty-eight, her looks three-quarters gone, famous in some other suburb as a nagging wife. Jessica smiled, as if he had related a pleasant joke. Again she made the effort to concentrate.

  You had to do that: to concentrate and to listen properly, as Malcolm was listening, as she had listened herself to the talk about a house in Spain. You had to have a bouncy wallpaper all over the house, and fresh white paint instead of gravy-brown. You mustn’t forget your plan to get the garden as colourful as this one; you mustn’t let your mind wander. Busily you must note the damp appearance of a man’s moustache and the grey in a woman’s hair, and the malevolence in the eyes that were piercing into you now.

  ‘I’ve written off those years, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said, and across the garden Malcolm saw that his wife had collapsed. He could tell at once, as if she’d fallen to the grass and lay there in a heap. Occasionally one or the other of them went under; impossible to anticipate which, or how it would happen.

  He watched her face and saw that she was back in 1954, her pains developing a rhythm, a sweltering summer afternoon. A message had come to him in court, and when he’d returned to the house the midwife was smoking a cigarette in the hall. The midwife and the nurse had been up all night with a difficult delivery in Sheen. Afterwards, when the child had been born and everything tidied up, he’d given them a glass of whisky each.

  Like an infection, all of it slipped across the garden, through the cigarette smoke and the people and the smartly casual Sunday clothes, from Jessica to Malcolm. Down their treacherous Memory Lane it dragged them, one after the other. The first day at the primary school, tears at the gate, the kindly dinner lady. The gang of four, their child and three others, at daggers drawn with other gangs. The winning of the high jump.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Malcolm said. It was worse for Jessica, he thought in a familiar way as he made his way to her. It was worse because after the birth she’d been told she must not have other babies: she blamed herself now for being obedient.

  They left the party suddenly, while the children still played a version of Grandmother’s Footsteps by the tool-shed, and the adults drank and went on talking to one another. People who knew them guessed that their abrupt departure might somehow have to do with their son, whom no one much mentioned these days, he being a registered drug addict. The couple who had spoken to Jessica about their Spanish house spoke of it now to their hosts, who did not listen as well as she had. Anthea Chalmers tried to explain to Marcus Stire’s friend, but that was hopeless. Marcus Stire again surveyed the people in the garden.

  Anger possessed Malcolm as they walked across the common that had been peaceful in the early morning. It was less so now. Cricket would be played that afternoon and preparations were being made, the square marked, the sight-screens wheeled into position. An ice-cream van was already trading briskly. People lay on the grass, youths kicked a football.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said. Her voice was nervous; she felt ashamed of herself.

  ‘It isn’t you, Jessica.’

  ‘Let’s have a drink on our own, shall we?’

  Neither of them wishing to return immediately to their house, they went to the Red Rover and sat outside. She guessed his thoughts, as earlier he had seen hers in her face. When people wondered where all of it had gone, all that love and all those flowers, he would have liked to have shown them their darkened upstairs room. The jolly sixties and those trips to wonderland were there, he’d once cried out, with half-made aeroplanes gathering a dust. Their son had a name, which was used when they addressed him; but when they thought of him he was nameless in their minds. Years ago they’d discovered that that was the same for both of them.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, referring to the future, trying to cheer him up.

  He made a gesture, half a nod: the speculation was impossible. And the consolation that families had always had children who were locked away and looked after wasn’t a consolation in the least. They didn’t have to live with a monstrous fact of nature, but with a form of accidental suicide, and that was worse.

  They sat a little longer in the sunshine, both of them thinking about the house they’d left an hour or so ago. It would be as silent as if they’d never had a child, and then little noises would begin, like the noises of a ghost. The quiet descent of the stairs, the shuffling through the hall. He would be there in the kitchen, patiently sitting, when they returned. He would smile at them and during lunch a kind of conversation might develop, or it might not. A week ago he’d said, quite suddenly, that soon he intended to work in a garden somewhere, or a park. Occasionally he said things like that.

  They didn’t mention him as they sat there; they never did now. And it was easier for both of them to keep away from Memory Lane when they were together and alone. Instead of all that there was the gossip of Marcus Stire: Susanna Maidstone in the Trat-West, the girl from the office arriving in the Morrishes’ house, the quarrel between the smiling woman and her suede-clad husband, Anthea Chalmers, lone Mr Fulmer, the Livingstons endeavouring to make a go of it. Easily, Malcolm imagined Marcus Stire’s drawling tones and the sharpness of his eye, like a splinter of glass. He knew now how Jessica had been upset: a pair of shadows Marcus Stire would have called them, clinging to the periphery of life because that was where they felt safe, both of them a little destroyed.

  They went on discussing the people they’d just left, wondering if some fresh drama had broken out, another explosion in the landscape of marriage that Marcus Stire had likened to a minefield. Finishing their drinks, they agreed that he’d certainly tell them if it had. They talked about him for a moment, and then the subject of the party drifted away from them and they talked of other things. Malcolm told her what was happening in Edwin Drood, because it was a book she would never read. His voice continued while they left the Red Rover and walked across the common, back to their house. It was odd, she reflected as she listened to it, that companionship had developed in their middle age, when luckier people made of their marriages such tales of woe.

  The Paradise Lounge

  On her high stool
by the bar the old woman was as still as a statue. Perhaps her face is expressionless, Beatrice thought, because in repose it does not betray the extent of her years. The face itself was lavishly made up, eyes and mouth, rouge softening the wrinkles, a dusting of perfumed powder. The chin was held more than a little high, at an angle that tightened the loops of flesh beneath it. Grey hair was short beneath a black cloche hat that suggested a fashion of the past, as did the tight black skirt and black velvet coat. Eighty she’d be, Beatrice deduced, or eighty-two or -three.

  ‘We can surely enjoy ourselves,’ Beatrice’s friend said, interrupting her scrutiny of the old woman. ‘Surely we can, Bea?’

  She turned her head. The closeness of his brick-coloured flesh and of the smile in his eyes caused her lips to tremble. She appeared to smile also, but what might have been taken for pleasure was a checking of her tears.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

  They were married, though not to one another. Beatrice’s friend, casually dressed for a summer weekend, was in early middle age, no longer slim yet far from bulky. Beatrice was thirty-two, petite and black-haired in a blue denim dress. Sunglasses disguised her deep-rust eyes, which was how - a long time ago now – her father had described them. She had wanted to be an actress then.

  ‘It’s best,’ her friend said, repeating the brief statement for what might have been the hundredth time since they had settled into his car earlier that afternoon. The affair was over, the threat to their families averted. They had come away to say goodbye.

  ‘Yes, I know it’s best,’ she said, a repetition also.

  At the bar the old woman slowly raised a hand to her hat and touched it delicately with her fingers. Slowly the hand descended, and then lifted her cocktail glass. Her scarlet mouth was not quite misshapen, but age had harshly scored what once had been a perfect outline, lips pressed together like a rosebud on its side. Failure, Beatrice thought as casually she observed all this: in the end the affair was a failure. She didn’t even love him any more, and long ago he’d ceased to love her. It was euphemism to call it saying goodbye: they were having a dirty weekend, there was nothing left to lift it higher than that.