The Stories of Jane Gardam Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2014 by Jane Gardam

  First publication 2014 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609452100

  Jane Gardam

  THE STORIES

  For Richard Beswick

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  HETTY SLEEPING

  LUNCH WITH RUTH SYKES

  THE GREAT, GRAND, SOAP-WATER KICK

  THE SIDMOUTH LETTERS

  A SPOT OF GOTHIC

  THE TRIBUTE

  THE PIG BOY

  RODE BY ALL WITH PRIDE

  THE EASTER LILIES

  THE FIRST ADAM

  THE PANGS OF LOVE

  STONE TREES

  AN UNKNOWN CHILD

  SHOWING THE FLAG

  SWAN

  DAMAGE

  THE DIXIE GIRLS

  GROUNDLINGS

  GRACE

  MISS MISTLETOE

  TELEGONY

  I: GOING INTO A DARK HOUSE

  II: SIGNOR SETTIMO

  III: THE HOT SWEETS OF CREMONA

  THE BOY WHO TURNED INTO A BIKE

  MISSING THE MIDNIGHT

  THE ZOO AT CHRISTMAS

  OLD FILTH

  THE GREEN MAN

  SOUL MATES

  THE PEOPLE ON PRIVILEGE HILL

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  I have always preferred writing short stories to writing novels. Not that there is much similarity and not that a writer can usually get away with writing only one or the other (Katherine Mansfield almost did). Stories of all lengths and depths come from mysterious parts of the cave. The difference in writing them is that, for a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder. For me it was James Joyce’s Dubliners, written in 1921, seven years before I was born, that showed me how (or at any rate that) short stories can have the power to burn up the chaff, harden the steel without comment or embellishment or explanation. I like Irish, French, Russian and American short stories best. They are the strongest.

  Human beings, it seems to me, are dependent on story—stories—painted on cave walls, sung on jangling instruments, chanted or spoken in lullaby from their beginnings. Children deprived of stories grow up bewildered by their own boredom.

  My own first awareness of stories was when I was four years old, listening to my mother as we sat at my bedroom window and I writhed and wriggled on her knee as children do when they listen without looking. I had just lately realised that the marks in the middle of the small, shiny pages of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit were words. They had sounds invisibly attached. Attaching the sounds to the marks was called ‘Reading’. Pictures were great, but they were extras. It was a moment of joy.

  At the same time, it was a moment of disquiet for above my head, at the window behind the curtain, there was something terrible. I couldn’t see it but I knew that it was there (‘Will you please SIT STILL!’) ‘But there’s something there behind the curtain.’ ‘Don’t be silly.’

  I jumped up and tweaked the curtain, and behind it sat a disgusting freckled blackish parrot with loose-skinned leathery claws. I knew that the parrot was death.

  I wriggled on. Out of the window the huge sky, the weedy railway line, the space between two empty shabby mansions, the distant Cleveland Hills. Eight years later (1940) I was sitting doing my homework and still I didn’t care to look up at that curtain when a little aeroplane flew past, very low. It had a swastika on its side and I could see the dark round bullet of the pilot’s helmet. I shrieked out: ‘There’s an enemy plane.’ Up from the kitchen came the command not to be silly when from somewhere near the steelworks to the north of us came the most almighty explosion. The dangerous presence was still there.

  Five years ago, at eighty, I went to look at my old home again and it looked exactly the same as in the ’30s—beautifully kept, polished door-knocker and letter-box, rows of perfect antirrhinums straight as pink soldiers—except that I found I could still only manage a quick glance at my bedroom window, now covered in net. I found myself shaking. ‘Jane has always had her ecstatic side,’ my mother used to say, ‘and ecstasy is all very well, but—’

  It wasn’t ecstasy that got me away from the burden of home. It was English literature and an award to London University that set my ecstatic side aflame. Then it went out. The work was dreary, heavy with Anglo Saxon, and there was no money for theatres or extra food. Though I didn’t admit it, I was bored except for when I was in the wonderful but ice-cold Bedford College Library (no coal or heating in the ’40s). At school the domestic science mistress who was vague about geography had asked me when I reached London to go and visit her niece—newly arrived from ‘the Colonies’ and very shy. Her school was near Reading (which she pronounced as in reading) and that sounded promisingly like a suburb of London. I nearly turned back when I found the train fare was ten shillings. I used my last faded bank note.

  And then I was greatly humbled by the school-girl niece herself who looked all of twenty-one, wore wonderful clothes, was bronzed by African sun and was clearly not home-sick at all. She didn’t know what to do with me. Desperately, she said there was a lecture that afternoon by L. A. G. Strong, a well-known critic then, on ‘The Short Story’. Would I like to come to it?

  I had read his book, The Short Story at school and what he thought, I thought too. In it he says, ‘Think of the reader not yourself. Make everything interesting. Write about everything—even linoleum.’

  On the way back to the London train I followed L. A. G. Strong. I climbed into the same carriage. I sat down beside him. He looked dejected and tired with deep lines between his nose and his sweet mouth. I fell in love. I began to talk. This may sound like nothing, but for me, almost pathologically self-conscious, it was like removing all my clothes and belly-dancing. In time he said, ‘I believe you write’ and I said yes. ‘Send me something.’ Looking weary, he courteously passed me a card.

  I went back to college (ecstasy in the ascendant) and sent him a short story (called The Woman Who Lost a Thought—and I have it yet) and waited.

  Silence. Silence for two weeks. Then a letter typed in royal blue ink, ‘Jane—you are a writer beyond all possible doubt.’

  And for a while I stayed with short stories. The first volume of them was about children on a white beach, and I called it A Few Fair Days. I posted it in a letter box on the corner of Murray Road in Wimbledon. After three weeks I telephoned the publisher and asked if she was going to accept them as there were other publishers who might like them. Astounded silence. The publisher, at Hamish Hamilton, said afterwards that she had told her secretary there was a mad woman on the phone and would she find her manuscript and send it back. The secretary found it in the three-foot high pile of unsolicited manuscripts and said ‘D’you know—I think these might just do.’

  I have written and published eight or nine collections of short stories and ten novels since then. One won the Katherine Mansfield award,
two won the Whitbread and another was a collection about Jamaica, where I had only spent sixteen days, and it won nothing. I was getting rather above myself. These early stories are somewhat wild. Then a new publisher asked for a collection with ‘more stories, if you think you can’ and I airily said, ‘of course’. I don’t think this was true. I turned for some years to novels and harder work and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

  Writing fiction has been my life for the past forty years. I finished what I thought should be my last book a year ago, the final novel of a trilogy called Old Filth. Last Friends is a novel, but I like to think it has short stories embedded. When I finished, ‘Farewell,’ I said. ‘Amen.’ I must learn when to stop. That is what short stories teach you.

  Yet perhaps the most gratifying thing since writing this book and its two companion volumes before, which have taken eight years, was the phone call this year from my most faithful and enduring publisher, Richard Beswick of Little, Brown. He asked for ‘a big, chunky anthology of all your favourite short stories.’ I said that I understood that nobody wanted to read short stories now but he said, ‘You are wrong. Look around. Choose your favourites. Times are changing once again.’

  The deathly parrot recedes. Maybe he was never there. How much more and how much better I might have written had I not been so timid.

  Reading Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man the other day I came upon the ballad of The Outlandish Knight where the heroine escapes death and returns home to safety. There is nobody there but a parrot in the window (I swear I had not read this poem at four years old).

  The parrot being up in the window so high

  And hearing the lady did say

  ‘I’m afraid some ruffian has led you astray

  That you’ve tarried so long away.’

  Well, the parrot is vanquished and the ecstasy is now fitful. The luck in the writer’s life always is to have been able to use the sweets of fiction to get near the truth.

  JANE GARDAM

  May 2014

  THE STORIES

  HETTY SLEEPING

  Seeing the tall man’s long back she thought with a lurch, ‘It’s like Heneker’s back.’ Then as he turned round she saw that it was Heneker.

  He was standing on a pale strip of sand near the sea, looking down into the cold water, quiet as he had always been, peaceful, unmistakable.

  ‘How could it be?’ she thought. ‘What nonsense! Of course it can’t be.’

  She went on folding the tee-shirts and jeans, gathering flung sandals, then made two neat heaps with a towel on each, for when the children came out of the sea. She took off her cardigan, pushed her hands back through her hair, gave her face for a moment to the sun; looked again.

  She watched her two children run with drumming feet over the hard white strand, splash past the man into the sea, fling themselves into it in fans of spray, shrieking. Then she looked at the man again.

  Long brown legs, long brown back. He was watching with a painter’s concentration the movement of the water and the shapes of the children playing in it. Twenty, thirty yards away, yet she could not mistake the slow smile, the acceptance as he narrowed his eyes and looked at lines and planes and shadows, that there are wonders on the earth.

  It was Heneker all right. Ten years older but decidedly and only Heneker.

  He turned, came up the beach, dropped down beside her and said ‘Hello.’ He was wearing black swimming trunks and had a beard. ‘Funny,’ she thought, ‘I always laugh at beards in the sea, but he looks all right. He always did look all right. Wherever he was.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  He hadn’t said her name. Perhaps he’d forgotten it. He had never used people’s names much. He had been cautious. Except in his work.

  ‘Hello, Hetty,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time.’

  ‘It’s a funny place,’ she said. He smiled, not looking away from her face. ‘To meet again,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way from Earl’s Court. Connemara.’

  ‘A holiday,’ he said gently and began to take the sand and sift it through his fingers. Her heart started to lurch again seeing his fingers. ‘I know each nail,’ she thought, ‘I know each line on them. Every half moon. Oh God!’

  There was a shriek from the sea and he looked over his brown shoulder at the children. ‘Yours?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ She began to babble. ‘They’re eight and four. Andy and Sophie. We’re here for a fortnight. We’ve taken a house.’

  ‘And their Papa?’

  ‘He’s following. He was to have come with us but at the last minute there was a crisis. We came ahead. We’d booked the house you see. The Pin.’

  ‘The Pin? Lord Thing’s house? Ballinhead?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a fishing lodge—’

  ‘I know.’ He swung round on to his stomach and got hold of her bare feet and held them tight. ‘Hetty,’ he said, looking closely at her toes. ‘Wonderful feet,’ he said. ‘They always were. I once drew your feet. So you’ve married brass?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘When we married there was no brass at all. He’s clever. He’s good. At his job. Marvellous if you want to know.’

  ‘Top brass?’

  ‘Not at all. Don’t be silly. I was a painter. Would I have married top brass?’

  ‘Very silly not to if you had the chance. Colonel and Lady Top-Brass, V.C., X.Y.Z. and Bar. Are you Lady Brass? You look it a bit, with your white, white skin.’

  ‘Don’t be silly—’

  He held her feet tight and put his forehead against them. ‘Lord and Lady Top-Brass and all the little alloys.’

  ‘Shut up!’ (This can’t be happening! We arrived yesterday. We’ve hardly been here ten minutes! Heneker!) She tried to free her feet and giggled. ‘You’re tickling,’ she said. ‘Don’t breathe over me.’

  He let go of her feet and said, ‘What is he then?’

  ‘A banker.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Do you know any bankers? Men with international work?’

  ‘No, thank God. “Men with international work.” Do you know any painters still?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Do you do any painting?’

  After a long time she said no.

  He lay flat on his back now on the sand and spread his arms far out and closed his eyes. His bearded, gentle face and fine nose and peaceful expression were like an icon. She thought, ‘He ought to be picked out in jewels he’s so beautiful. He’s wicked as ever. Oh God, I love him,’ and getting up she gathered the two heaps of clothes with a swoosh into the beach bag and the cardigan and her book and the towels in her arms, and was off down the beach to the sea’s edge. ‘I’m moving,’ she called to the children. ‘I’m going back up to the car. Don’t be long, darlings. Ten minutes.’

  ‘But we’ve just got in! We were staying in all morning.’

  ‘There’s a wind.’

  ‘But it’s lovely!’

  ‘No, it’s cold. I’m moving out of the wind.’

  ‘There’s not a breath of wind,’ shouted Andy. ‘Not a bit. You’re crazy. It’s a boiling day.’

  ‘I’ll be up in the car,’ and resolutely, not looking back, she tramped up the beach alone and sat by the car in the sharp grass among old picnic papers, where red ants nipped her and noisy wild dogs from the fishermen’s cabins came and barked endlessly for food as she pretended to read.

  She was bathing Sophie at The Pin that evening in water that foamed like Guinness into the noble old Guinness-stained bath-tub when a noise of thundering hooves began to rock the bathroom ceiling and the water from the tap turned to a trickle and died.

  ‘Now what!’ Hetty sat back on her heels. ‘Sixty pounds a week! Sixty pounds a week! The phone is dead, the electrics flicker and the beastly peat . ⁠. ⁠. And now this.’

  ‘Whatever is it?
’ Andy came flying in.

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s the boiler or something. I think it’s dry.’

  ‘The water’s hot as hot.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s stopped coming. The tank must be empty. It comes from that bog thing in the grounds—we saw it yesterday. I thought it looked awfully shallow.’

  ‘It looked awfully dirty,’ said Andy, ‘and so does the bath.’

  ‘No. It’s lovely brown water,’ she said. ‘But, oh!’

  ‘I expect it’ll all blow up soon,’ said Andy. ‘Shall I go and throw the main switch? It might be safer.’

  ‘No. Shush. Let me think.’

  ‘Above the kitchen door. That great heavy big one?’

  ‘No. Oh do shut up. Let me think. There’s the pub. We might go to the pub. There might be a man.’

  ‘There is a man.’

  ‘At the pub?’

  ‘No, here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes. In the hall place. He’s that man on the beach. He’s playing with our plasticine. Wait, I’ll ask him.’

  Hetty on a cane chair by the bathroom window, with Sophie wrapped in a towel on her knee, saw Andy and Heneker walking thoughtfully together, hand in hand through the wild garden towards the source of the bathwater.

  The thunder in the roof, however, continued.

  When she brought Sophie down the stairs Heneker was at the big trestle table in the hall making a plasticine dinosaur and without looking up said, ‘There seemed nothing wrong down there. Must be a block in the pipe.’