We live in hard-nosed times.
The still unravished bride, the cherry tree, takes flowering possession of the wild garden; the ex-peach thief contemplates the prospect of ripe fruit the birds will eat, not I. Curious euphemism ‘to go’, meaning death, to depart on a journey.
Somewhere along another year to heaven, I elicited the following laborious explanation of male sexual response, which is the other side of the moon, the absolute mystery, the one thing I can never know.
‘You put it in, which isn’t boring. Then you rock backwards and forwards. That can get quite boring. Then you come. That’s not boring.’
For ‘you’, read ‘him’.
‘You come; or as we Japanese say, go.’
Just so. ‘Ikimasu,’ to go. The Japanese orgasmic departure renders the English orgasmic arrival, as if the event were reflected in the mirror and the significance of it altogether different – whatever significance it may have, that is. Desire disappears in its fulfilment, which is cold comfort for hot blood and the reason why there is no such thing as a happy ending.
Besides all this, Japanese puts all its verbs at the ends of its sentences, which helps to confuse the foreigner all the more, so it seemed to me they themselves never quite knew what they were saying half the time.
‘Everything here is arsy-varsy.’
‘No. Where you are is arsy-varsy.’
And never the twain shall meet. He loved to be bored; don’t think he was contemptuously dismissive of the element of boredom inherent in sexual activity. He adored and venerated boredom. He said that dogs, for example, were never bored, nor birds, so, obviously, the capacity that distinguished man from the other higher mammals, from the scaled and feathered things, was that of boredom. The more bored one was, the more one expressed one’s humanity.
He liked redheads. ‘Europeans are so colourful,’ he said.
He was a tricky bugger, that one, a Big Peach, all right; face of Gérard Philipe, soul of Nechaev. I grabbed, grabbed and grabbed and, since I did not have much experience in grabbing, often bit off more than I could chew. Exemplary fate of the plump peach-thief; someone refuses to be assimilated. Once a year, when I look at Letty’s cherry tree in flower, I put the image to work, I see the petals fall on a face that looked as if it had been hammered out of gold, like the mask of Agamemnon which Schliemann found at Troy.
The mask turns into a shining carp and flips off the hook at the end of the fishing line. The one that got away.
Let me not romanticise you too much. Because what would I do if you did resurrect yourself? Came knocking at my door in all your foul, cool, chic of designer jeans and leather blouson and your pocket stuffed with G.N.P., arriving somewhat late in the day to make an honest woman of me as you sometimes used to threaten that you might? ‘When you’re least expecting it . . .’ God, I’m forty, now. Forty! I had you marked down for a Demon Lover; what if indeed you popped up out of the grave of the heart bright as a button with an American car purring outside waiting to whisk me away to where the lilies grow on the bottom of the sea? ‘I am now married to a house carpenter,’ as the girl in the song exclaimed hurriedly. But all the same, off she went with the lovely cloven-footed one. But I wouldn’t. Not I.
And how very inappropriate too, the language of antique ballads in which to address one who knew best the international language of the jukebox. You’d have one of those Wurlitzer Cadillacs you liked, that you envied G.I.s for, all ready to humiliate me with; it would be bellowing out quadraphonic sound. The Everly Brothers. Jerry Lee Lewis. Early Presley. (‘When I grow up,’ you reveried, ‘I’m going to Memphis to marry Presley.’) You were altogether too much, you pure child of the late twentieth century, you person from the other side of the moon or mirror, and your hypothetical arrival is a catastrophe too terrifying to contemplate, even in the most plangent state of regret for one’s youth.
I lead a quiet life in South London. I grind my coffee beans and drink my early cup to a spot of early baroque on the radio. I am now married to a house carpenter. Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I’ll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.
And yet . . .
*
Going out into the back garden to pick rosemary to put inside a chicken, the daffodils in the uncut grass, enough blackbirds out to make a pie.
Letty’s cat sits on Letty’s windowsill. The blinds are drawn; the social worker drew them five days ago before she drove off in her little Fiat to the hospital, following Letty in the ambulance. I call to Letty’s cat but he doesn’t turn his head. His fluff has turned to spikes, he looks spiny as a horse-chestnut husk.
Letty is in hospital supping broth from a spouted cup and, for all my kind heart, of which I am so proud, my empathy and so on, I myself had not given Letty’s companion another thought until today, going out to pick rosemary with which to stuff a roast for our greedy dinners.
I called him again. At the third call, he turned his head. His eyes looked as if milk had been poured into them. The garden wall too high to climb since now I am less limber than I was, I chucked half the contents of a guilty tin of cat food over. Come and get it.
Letty’s cat never moved, only stared at me with its curtained eyes. And then all the fat, sleek cats from every garden up and down came jumping, leaping, creeping to the unexpected feast and gobbled all down, every crumb, quick as a wink. What a lesson for a giver of charity! At the conclusion of this heartless banquet at which I’d been the thoughtless host, the company of well-cared-for beasts stretched their swollen bellies in the sun and licked themselves, and then, at last, Letty’s cat heaved up on its shaky legs and launched itself, plop on to the grass.
I thought, perhaps he got a belated whiff of cat food and came for his share, too late, all gone. The other cats ignored him. He staggered when he landed but soon righted himself. He took no interest at all in the stains of cat food, though. He managed a few doddering steps among the dandelions. Then I thought he might be going to chew on a few stems of medicinal grass; but he did not so much lower his head towards it as let his head drop, as if he had no strength left to lift it. His sides were caved-in under stiff, voluminous fur. He had not been taking care of himself. He peered vaguely around, swaying.
You could almost have believed, not that he was waiting for the person who always fed him to come and feed him again as usual, but that he was pining for Letty herself.
Then his hind legs began to shudder involuntarily. He so convulsed himself with shuddering that his hind legs jerked off the ground; he danced. He jerked and shuddered, shuddered and jerked, until at last he vomited up a small amount of white liquid. Then he pulled himself to his feet again and lurched back to the windowsill. With a gigantic effort, he dragged himself up.
Later on, somebody jumped over the wall, more sprightly than I and left a bowl of bread and milk. But the cat ignored that too. Next day, both were still there, untouched.
The day after that, only the bowl of sour sops, and cherry blossom petals drifting across the vacant windowsill.
Small sins of omission remind one of the greater sins of omission; at least sins of commission have the excuse of choice, of intention. However:
May. A blowy, bright-blue, bright-green morning; I go out on the front steps with a shifting plastic sack of garbage and what do I see but the social worker’s red Fiat putter to a halt next door.
In the hospital they’d henna’d Letty. An octogenarian redhead, my big babushka who contains my forty, my thirty, my twenty, my ten years within her fragile basket of bones, she has returned, not in a humiliating ambulance, but on her own two feet that she sets down more firmly than she did. She has put on a little weight. She has a better colour, not only in her hair but in her cheeks.
The landlord, foiled.
Escorted by the social worker, the district nurse, the home help, the abrasive yet not ungentle niece, Letty is escorted d
own the unswept, grass-grown basement stairs into her own scarcely used front door that someone with a key has remembered to unbolt from inside for her return. Her new cockatoo crest – whoever henna’d her really understood henna – points this way and that way as she makes sure that nothing in the street has changed, even if she can see only large blocks of light and shadow, hear, not the shrieking blackbirds, but only the twitch of the voices in her ear that shout: ‘Carefully does it, Letty.’
‘I can manage,’ she said tetchily.
The door the policemen battered in closes upon her and her chattering entourage.
The window of the front room of the cow upstairs slams down, bang.
And what am I to make of that? I’d set it up so carefully, an enigmatic structure about evanescence and ageing and the mists of time, shadows lengthening, cherry blossom, forgetting, neglect, regret . . . the sadness, the sadness of it all . . .
But. Letty. Letty came home.
In the corner shop, the cow upstairs, mad as fire: ‘They should have certified her’; the five grand the landlord promised her so that he could sell the house with vacant possession has blown away on the May wind that disintegrated the dandelion clocks. In Letty’s garden now is the time for fierce yellow buttercups; the cherry blossom is over, no regrets.
I hope she is too old and too far gone to miss the cat.
Fat chance.
I hope she never wonders if the nice warm couple next door thought of feeding him.
But she has come home to die at her own apparently ample leisure in the comfort and privacy of her basement; she has exercised, has she not, her right to choose, she has turned all this into crazy patchwork.
Somewhere along my thirtieth year, I left a husband in a bus station in Houston, Texas, a town to which I have never returned, over a quarrel about a peach which, at the time, seemed to sum up the whole question of the rights of individuals within relationships, and, indeed, perhaps it did.
As you can tell from the colourful scraps of oriental brocade and Turkish homespun I have sewn into this bedcover, I then (call me Ishmael) wandered about for a while and sowed (or sewed) a wild oat or two into this useful domestic article, this product of thrift and imagination, with which I hope to cover myself in my old age to keep my brittle bones warm. (How cold it is in Letty’s basement.)
But, okay, so I always said the blossom would come back again, but Letty’s return from the clean white grave of the geriatric ward is ridiculous! And, furthermore, when I went out into the garden to pick a few tulips, there he is, on the other side of the brick wall, lolling voluptuously among the creeping buttercups, fat as butter himself – Letty’s been feeding him up.
‘I’m pleased to see you,’ I said.
In a Japanese folk tale it would be the ghost of her cat, rusty and tactile as in life, the poor cat pining itself from death to life again to come to the back door at the sound of her voice. But we are in South London on a spring morning. Lorries fart and splutter along the Wandsworth Road. Capital Radio is braying from an upper window. An old cat, palpable as a second-hand fur coat, drowses among the buttercups.
We know when we were born but –
the times of our reprieves are equally random.
Shake it out and look at it again, the flowers, fruit and bright stain of henna, the Russian dolls, the wrinkling chiffon of the flesh, the old songs, the cat, the woman of eighty; the woman of forty, with dyed hair and most of her own teeth, who is ma semblable, ma soeur. Who now recedes into the deceptive privacy of a genre picture, a needlewoman, a quilt maker, a middle-aged woman sewing patchwork in a city garden, turning her face vigorously against the rocks and trees of the patient wilderness waiting round us.
Appendix
AFTERWORD TO FIREWORKS
I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did inside it and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them, I was writing, therefore, tales.
Though it took me a long time to realise why I liked them, I’d always been fond of Poe, and Hoffman – Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious – mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects. Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience.
The Gothic tradition in which Poe writes grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. Character and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural – and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a singular moral function – that of provoking unease.
The tale has relations with subliterary forms of pornography, ballad and dream, and it has not been dealt with kindly by literati. And is it any wonder? Let us keep the unconscious in a suitcase, as Père Ubu did with his conscience, and flush it down the lavatory when it gets too troublesome.
So I worked on tales. I was living in Japan; I came back to England in 1972. I found myself in a new country. It was like waking up, it was a rude awakening. We live in Gothic times. Now, to understand and to interpret is the main thing; but my method of investigation is changing.
These stories were written between 1970 and 1973 and are arranged in chronological order, as they were written. There is a small tribute to Defoe, father of the bourgeois novel in England, inserted in the story ‘Master’.
First Publications
‘The Man Who Loved a Double Bass’ first appeared in Storyteller Contest, July 1962. ‘A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home’ was first published in Nonesuch, in Autumn 1965 and ‘A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)’ was also published in Nonesuch, in Summer/Autumn 1966.
‘A Souvenir of Japan’, ‘The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter’, The Loves of Lady Purple’, ‘The Smile of Winter’, ‘Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest’, ‘Flesh and the Mirror’, ‘Master’, ‘Reflections’ and ‘Elegy for a Freelance’, written between 1970 and 1973, were all originally published in Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (Quartet Books, 1974).
‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ first appeared in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Victor Gollancz, 1979). ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ was originally published in British Vogue , ‘Puss-in-Boots’ appeared in the anthology The Straw and the Gold, edited by Emma Tennant (Pierrot Books, 1979). ‘The Erl-King’ appeared in Bananas (October, 1977), ‘The Snow Child’ was broadcast on the BBC Radio Four programme Not Now, I’m Listening. ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ was first published in The Iowa Review (Summer/Autumn 1975), ‘The Werewolf in’ South-West Arts Review (No 2, October, 1977), ‘The Company of Wolves’ in Bananas (April, 1977) and ‘Wolf-Alice’ in Stand (Winter, 1978, vol. 2, No 2).
‘Black Venus’ first appeared in Next Editions in 1980, ‘The Kiss’ was originally published in Harper’s and Queen, in 1977, ‘Our Lady of the Massacre’ appeared in The Saturday Night Reader as ‘Captured by the Red Man’ in 1979. ‘The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe’ was published in Interzone in 1982, as was ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. ‘Peter and the Wolf’ is from Firebird 1, 1982. A version of ‘The Kitchen Child’ was published in Vogue, 1979, and ‘The Fall Ri
ver Axe Murder’ originally appeared in The London Review of Books in 1981 under the title ‘Mis-en-Scene for Parricide’.
A version of ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’ was first published in Cosmopolitan in September 1981, and broadcast on Radio Three. ‘John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ originally appeared in Granta 25, Autumn, 1988. ‘Gun for the Devil’ was written as a draft for a screenplay and published in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Chatto & Windus, 1993). ‘The Merchant of Shadows’ was published in the London Review of Books in October 1989. ‘Alice in Prague or The Curious Room’ appeared in Spell, [Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature], (vol 5, 1990) and ‘The Ghost Ships’ was first published in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Chatto & Windus, 1993). ‘In Pantoland’ was originally published in the Guardian in December 1991. ‘Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost’ was first published in the Virago Book of Ghost Stories (Virago, 1987), and a shorter version was published in Soho Square. A version of ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ originally appeared in FMR Magazine in February 1992.
‘The Snow Pavilion’ is published here for the first time. ‘The Scarlet House’ was originally published in A Book of Contemporary Nightmares (Michael Joseph, 1977) and ‘The Quilt Maker’ was published in Sex and Sensibility: Stories by Contemporary Women Writers from Nine Countries (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981).
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Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Page 60