The Collected Stories

One day they came with their child to the house to swim in the sea and Norman had behaved as if in his own house. He’d gone upstairs after swimming and started to shower without asking. The man had asked them to leave. It had been the last straw.

  ‘They’d practically to shit all over the house before you asked them to leave,’ the woman taunted.

  ‘Can’t you shut up and give me some peace?’

  ‘And now we can’t even open doors or windows because of the shark. I don’t know what brought us to this country. Why did I ever leave my own birches?’ She started to cry.

  ‘Can’t you, can’t you shut up!’ the man said. ‘And you’re not going to provoke me into hitting you. That’s too easy.’

  An image came of blood streaming down her finger from the splinters of a wine glass he’d swept once from her hand, the look of triumph on her face as she said, ‘Now we see the street angel in his royal colours – nothing but a mean, mean bully.’

  ‘You’re going to have to accept the fact of your own hatred. There’s no use absolving it temporarily by provoking me to violence.’

  ‘Bah,’ she said, ‘I laugh at that. I wouldn’t even bother to answer that.’

  III

  The man swept the dead spiders and scorpions and lizards across the floor of the empty pool and shovelled them out on to the bank. The dry scorpions broke into sections but the spiders and lizards lay stiff as in life on the bank of old mortar and gravel.

  The clean floor of the pool was ready for the waterman when he came. He backed up his small tanker, originally designed to carry petrol or fuel oil, to the edge of the pool. He’d saved the money to buy the tanker by working for one year in a steel works in Düsseldorf. He connected the ragged pipe to the end of the tanker, and when he turned the brass handle the water started to run into the pool with several small jets leaking out on the way. The woman came out in a blue bathrobe trimmed with white on the edges, and the three started to watch, in the simple fascination of water filling an empty pool.

  ‘The fish, the fish it stinks.’ The man pointed to the shore.

  ‘Yes, it stinks,’ the man answered.

  ‘What did you think of Germany?’

  ‘The roads, great roads, much speed.’

  Then suddenly he stiffened, gave a sharp cry of fear, and seized the shovel by the side of the pool, pointing to a scorpion between two stones close to the wall of the house. In a panic he started to beat it with the shovel until he made paste of it against the bone-hard ground. When he’d put the shovel aside he caught his ankle in his hand, miming gestures of pain.

  ‘Bad, bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen men made babies by the stings.’

  ‘It’s the only thing outside the humans that commits suicide,’ the woman said.

  It was a favourite subject of hers, the parallels between animal and human behaviour. It bored him.

  Mention of suicide suddenly brought back the early days of their relationship in that country of snow and birch trees and white houses rising out of red granite against a frozen sea, a light of metal that made the oranges and lemons shine like lamps in the harbour market. It was before they married. He was waiting for his papers to come and they were living in one of the houses along the shore close to the middle of the city.

  ‘It’s owned by the Actors’ Union for the actors when they get too old to act,’ she’d explained to him.

  ‘But how does it happen that you who are young and successful can get a room here?’

  ‘There’s not enough old ones. They have empty places.’

  ‘But where are the old, then?’

  ‘They’ve gone to the seaside.’

  He at once accepted that the Actors’ Union had two houses, and the elderly had a choice of a house in the city or a house by the seaside, until an evening over brandies and coffee with a friend of hers, the quiet Anselm, who was more interested in the history of rocking chairs than in his legal practice, had remarked, ‘It is extraordinary that the Actors’ Union give the retired a choice of a house in the city or by the sea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She said that the reason she had a room in the old actors’ house was that there were vacant rooms because some of the retired preferred to live in another house at the seaside, that they had choice.’

  ‘No, no.’ She’d overheard from the kitchen. ‘No, no. I meant that they’d gone to the suicide.’

  He grew aware of her hostile stare at the pool’s edge. Perhaps he was neglecting the waterman. Quickly he asked him if he’d have something to drink. He wanted water. When they’d given him the drink and paid him, the waterman told them he’d to hurry away to bring two loads of water for the Canadian’s roses before lunch.

  IV

  As soon as the tanker moved towards the dirt-track the man started to pump the water up to the tank on the roof, though he knew the woman was staring at his back with arms folded. The wooden handle of the pump had split, was held together with a rope, and was loose and awkward about the iron spike.

  ‘I want to speak to you about something.’ Her voice was cold.

  ‘What?’ he stopped.

  ‘When I was talking to the waterman you never listened to one word.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About the scorpion.’

  ‘Anybody’d see you were miles away but you want to be listened to yourself. And you start to pump to avoid having to listen to anything.’

  ‘I want to get the water up.’

  ‘Be honest. You’re either pumping water up. Or oiling the floor. Or walking on the beach. Or drunk in the rocking chair staring at the sea. Or running to the village for one thing or another.’

  ‘Someone has to get the things.’

  ‘Not that much. The child doesn’t always have to be running messages for Mammy.’ Her voice mimicked the singsong of a child’s voice.

  ‘Can’t you shut up?’

  ‘And you’ve done no work for more than a year now. Except run messages for Mammy.’ She continued the mimicry.

  ‘So I haven’t done any work. Well, I haven’t. And I want to pump the water up.’

  ‘That’s what you’re running from – your work and from me. I am married to a man who can neither talk nor work.’

  ‘You have to wait for work to come. Why don’t you do the work if you’re so keen on it, then?’

  ‘I’ve done the translations for the theatre.’

  He was about to say in irritation that translation wasn’t work but drew it back; there had been enough quarrelling for one morning.

  ‘I want to pump the water up,’ he said.

  ‘All right, pump the water up,’ she said and went in. As he pumped, both hands on the loose rope, he heard the sharp precise taps of her typewriter through the creak of the pumping and the water falling in the tank from the upstairs room.

  When the tank was full, the overflow spilling down on the crushed scorpion, he went towards the fig trees in the hollow between the house and mountain. He sat under the trees to save water. He picked a place between the blackened and dried turds under the trees. When his own smell started to rise above the sharksmell and the encircling flies, he heard the typewriter stop, and when he was close to the house the lavatory upstairs flushed.

  A rush of anger came, a waste of water: and then he remembered his father’s nagging over lights left on. ‘You burn enough electricity in this house to run a power station.’ He was ashamed that the instinct to save a few pence of light had become a resentment against the waste of water.

  V

  He climbed the stairs in the hope of making some amends. It was not an easy life with him in this place and she had followed him from her own country. He’d offered her little, he thought, the day they married: a morning waking into electric light, left on because of the bedbugs.

  She had to be at rehearsals at nine. Over breakfast they arranged to meet in the bookshop beside the theatre a half-hour before the wedding. He remembered watching her stand in the
sealskin cap and white lambswool coat at the bus stop until the bus came. In less than three hours they’d be married. A man is born and marries and dies, it’d be the toll of the second bell, one more to come; and there’d be no ceremonies, no ring, no gold or silver, no friends, no common culture or tongue: they’d offered each other only themselves.

  It was All Souls’ Day and the candles shone against the snow on the graves between the avenues of birches through the bus windows after crossing the bridge past the Alko factory.

  Her hands were trembling on the magazine in the bookshop when he arrived. ‘I thought you’d taken the plane.’

  ‘I am sorry I’m a bit late.’

  ‘You didn’t want to come?’

  ‘We better hurry.’

  The hall was like an unemployment exchange. She’d taken the script she had been working on at breakfast and made notes on the margins as they waited on the chairs.

  ‘It’s for the afternoon rehearsal,’ she explained.

  A couple in their early fifties, a bald man in a grey suit and a woman in pink taffeta, heavily made-up and carrying a sheaf of roses, were chatting and laughing with another couple.

  ‘What kind of people are they?’ he asked.

  ‘Probably married so often already that the church has refused them and they have to come here.’ She continued writing on the margins of the script.

  When they were called she asked the two porters to act as witnesses, tipped them when they agreed, and they followed sheepishly to the doorway of the room and remained there during the ceremony neither fully in nor out. The mayor stood with the chain of his office on his breast behind a leather-topped desk.

  When the mayor asked the man to put the wedding ring on her finger, they had none, and he looked on in disapproval as she took the silver ring with the green stone the sculptor killed in the car crash had given her, and the man put it on her wedding finger. It was with the same distaste that the mayor called the porters from the doorway to sign the certificate – but they were married. As he paid the fee she joked, ‘The divorce will cost much more.’

  They had coffee close to the harbour.

  ‘It seems as if nothing has happened,’ they said as she went back to rehearsal. He brought wine and meat and returned by bus past the glimmer of candles in the graveyard to switch on all the electric lights in the flat; two-thirty on the clock and already dusk deepening fast.

  It was the night of the Arts Ball their wedding quarrel began in the depression of bands and alcohol.

  ‘You didn’t want to marry me,’ she said.

  ‘I was there, wasn’t I?’

  ‘You deliberately left your passport behind.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have gone back for it if I had.’

  ‘You resented being married to me – it was unconscious.’

  ‘I hate this house of bugs. We needn’t ever have moved from the actors’.’

  ‘Never have moved when they were asking me at the theatre every day if I had the sailor in their flat yet!’

  It grew, until she threw the glass of whiskey, stinging his eyes, and they ran from each other in the snow, big snowflakes drifting between the trees. She went to a hotel and he back past the candles, now covered under snow, to the electric-lit room.

  Was this whole day to be the shape of their lives together?

  VI

  The door to the roof balcony was open at the head of the stairs, and on the balcony she lay naked on the yellow bands of the collapsible deck-chair, a bundle of old press cuttings by her head. She was examining an article about herself in a woman’s magazine. It had coloured pictures of her and had been written three years before.

  ‘You are taking sun?’

  ‘Why don’t you come and take sun too?’ she asked.

  ‘I will later. You are reading about yourself?’

  ‘It’s by Eva who used to live with me. She wanted to put in that I always slept under the pillow. She thought that’d be of much interest to her readers. I didn’t let her.’ She was happy and laughing.

  ‘Do you ever want to go back to the theatre?’

  ‘No, no. I married you to get out of the theatre. It’s a system of exploitation.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Everybody is abused and kicked, down to the actor who is the most kicked of all. It’s pure fascism.’

  ‘You’d never get anything done if someone didn’t impose his will.’

  ‘That’s what we’ve been taught and we must unlearn. There should be complete participation for everybody.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  He turned towards the sea. A woman was riding side-saddle past on the dirt-track on a mule. She was all in black against the sea, shaded by a black umbrella she held above her head with the same hand as held the reins.

  ‘That’s nothing but capitalistic propaganda,’ she said. The conversation was already boring the man.

  ‘What would you replace them with?’ he inquired, concealing his irritation.

  ‘Machines.’

  ‘And, say, if I didn’t want to go to see machines? If I want to go to see people?’

  ‘The machines will replace them so well as to make actors obsolete.’

  ‘Do you know what I remember?’ he said to avoid a quarrel. ‘The night you came from the theatre, first night of The Dragon, with all the roses, and we had to search among the roses for the one bottle of champagne.’

  ‘Do you love me as much as you did then?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. I love you as much,’ and he knew less and less what love was.

  ‘It’d be nice if we could have birches and lakes and snow and the white white houses here as well as sun and sea.’

  ‘It’d be nice,’ he agreed.

  ‘And no sharksmell,’ she laughed.

  VII

  ‘The cabbages,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t see to the cabbages. The day he was killed he wrote from the front for me to see to the cabbages.’

  ‘Why did he ask you?’

  ‘I was the farmer, I had the blonde hair, he wrote to me to look after the cabbages. I didn’t see to the cabbages.’

  ‘Why cabbages?’ The man tried to rock her quiet in his arms, stroking the straight blonde hair.

  ‘He was starting to grow cabbages, Father did, it was his plan, he wanted to spread out the earning, so as not to have to depend for all the money on the trees.’

  ‘How was he killed?’ The man realized he’d made a mistake in asking, the crying worsened, but perhaps it was better for her to cry the disturbance completely away.

  ‘In the forest. The soldiers were nervous. He was coming back from reconnoitring the Russian lines. The men were nervous. There were Russians in the forest. His Sergeant was killed too, but the two soldiers behind escaped.

  ‘They took the coffin out from the other coffins when the lorry brought him to the farm. And I didn’t see to the cabbages.’

  ‘If it wasn’t the cabbages it would be something else,’ he said. ‘All lives are so fragile that when they go for ever we feel as if we have betrayed them in some way.’ He tried to soothe.

  ‘I didn’t see to the cabbages,’ she sobbed, but more quietly, and then, ‘I’m sorry to break down like this.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all right. Why don’t we go for a swim?’

  ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ She suddenly smiled. ‘Let’s go for a swim.’

  Everybody got the same blows in some way or other, he thought as they changed into bathing costumes. Now in this house they were busy making miserable their passing lives, when it should be as easy to live together in some care or tenderness.

  ‘I didn’t see to the cabbages. I didn’t see to the cabbages,’ would not leave his head.

  VIII

  The bus passed them in a cloud of white dust, trussed fowl and goats and rabbits hanging out of the sides, as they walked away from the house and rotting shark. All the seats in the bus were full and men were standing. On the shore, oil and tar started to cling to their
ropesoles.

  ‘It’ll be nice when the shark disappears and we can swim down from the house again,’ the woman said. She’d begun to hum.

  ‘We won’t have this oil and tar.’ His words seemed to hang on the air in their ineffectiveness.

  They swam far out. The woman was the better swimmer, and twice she swam under the man, laughing as her yellow cap surfaced, and then they lay on their backs and let the waves roll against them, closing their eyes because of the fierceness of the light. They started touching each other until the woman said, ‘It’s so long since we had a fuck! Why don’t we go in and have a fuck now?’

  ‘Why not,’ he said. ‘We’ll go in.’

  They took the rope-soled sandals off the rock and walked unsure now in the knowledge of what they were about to do. Beyond the house and shark, the Canadian’s grey Rolls was being polished for its monthly outing to the bank in Murcia.

  In the play on the white sheet of the bed when the man went to part the lips of the woman’s sex she pushed him away.

  ‘Your fingers don’t excite me. It’s your penis I want. It makes me feel like being – curse it, it’s another word I don’t know.’

  She was about to reach for the dictionary when the man said, ‘No,’ and drew her to him. He tried to make up what each gallon cost of the load of water that had been put in the pool that morning to postpone his coming, but he still came long before her; and then, afraid he’d go limp, held her close for her to pump him until she came with a blind word in her own language, and as he listened to her panting it seemed that their small pleasures could hardly have happened more separately if they’d each been on opposite ends of the beach with the red house of the Canadian between.

  It had not seemed as hopeless as this once though there had always been trouble, and there’d been less talk of rights and positions, less talk of the fashionable psychologists in paperback on the floor by her side of the bed.

  ‘Do you think I could go to an analyst when we get back to London?’ She turned towards him from the white sheet washed at the stone trough of the fontana by old Maria’s hands. He started: it was as if she’d touched too close to his thought.