Little Black Book of Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  “Oh yes. I am doing wash day. It is therapeutic.”

  “Writing isn’t therapy,” said Jack Smollett to Cicely Fox. “Not when it’s good.”

  “I expect the motive doesn’t matter,” said Cicely Fox, in her vague voice. “One has to do one’s best.”

  He felt rebuffed, and didn’t know why.

  HE READ “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves” aloud to the class. He read contributions aloud, anonymously, himself. He had a fine voice, and often, not always, he did more justice to the writing than its author might have done. He could also, in the right mood, use the reading as a mode of ironic destruction. His practice was not to name the author of the piece. It was usually easy enough to guess.

  He enjoyed reading “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves.” He read it con brio, savouring the phrases that pleased him. For this reason, perhaps, the class fell upon it like a pack of hounds, snarling and ripping at it. They plucked merciless adjectives from the air. “Slow.” “Clumsy.” “Cold.” “Pedantic.” “Pompous.” “Show-off.” “Over-ornate.” “Nostalgic.”

  They criticised the movement, equally gaily. “No drive.” “No sense of urgency.” “Rambling.” “All over the place.” “No sense of the speaker.” “No real feeling.” “No living human interest.” “No reason for telling us all this stuff.”

  Bobby Forster, perhaps the star pupil of the class, was obscurely offended by Cicely Fox’s black-lead. His magnum opus, which was growing thicker, was a very detailed autobiographical account of his own childhood and youth. He had worked his way through measles, mumps, the circus, his school essays, his passions for schoolgirls, recording every fumbling on every sofa, at home, in the girls’ homes, in student lodgings, the point of the breast or the suspender he had struggled to touch. He sneered at rivals, put imperceptive parents and teachers in their place, described his reasons for dropping unattractive girls and acquaintances. He said Cicely Fox substituted things for people. He said detachment wasn’t a virtue, it just covered up inadequacy. Come to the point, said Bobby Forster. Why should I care about a daft toxic cleaning method that’s thankfully obsolete? Why doesn’t the writer give us the feelings of the poor skivvy who had to smear the stuff on?

  Tamsin Secrett was equally severe. She herself had written a heart-rending description of a mother lovingly preparing a meal for an ingrate who neither turned up to eat it nor telephoned to say she was not coming. “Tender succulent al-dente pasta fragrant with spicy herbs redolent of the South of France with tangy melt-in-the-mouth Parmesan, rich smooth virgin olive oil, delicately perfumed with truffle, mouthwateringly full of savour . . .” Tamsin Secrett said that description for its own sake was simply an exercise, every piece of writing needed an urgent human dimension, something vital at stake. “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves,” said Tamsin Secrett, was just mindless heritage-journalism. No bite, said Tamsin Secrett. No bite, agreed her daughter, Lola. Memory Lane. Yuk.

  CICELY FOX SAT rigorously upright, and smiled mildly and vaguely at their animation. She looked as though all this was nothing to do with her. Jack Smollett was not clear how much she heard. He himself, unusually, retaliated irritably on her behalf. He said that it was rare to read a piece of writing that worked on more than one level at once. He said that it took skill to make familiar things look strange. He quoted Ezra Pound: “Make it New.” He quoted William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.” He only ever did this when he was fired up. He was fired up, not only on Cicely Fox’s behalf, but more darkly on his own. For the class’s rancour, and the banal words in which it expressed that rancour, blew life into his anxiety over his own words, his own work. He called a coffee break, after which he read out Tamsin Secrett’s cookery-tragedy. The class liked that, on the whole. Lola said it was very touching. Mother and daughter kept up an elaborate charade that their writings had nothing to do with each other. The whole class colluded. There was nothing worse than dried-up overcooked spag, said Lola Secrett.

  THE CLASSES TENDED to end with general discussions of the nature of writing. They all took pleasure in describing themselves at work—what it was like to be blocked, what it was like to become unblocked, what it was like to capture a feeling precisely. Jack wanted Cicely Fox to join in. He addressed her directly, raising his voice slightly.

  “And why do you write, Miss Fox?”

  “Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.”

  This answer was, though it should not have been, unusual.

  Jack himself found it harder and harder to know where to begin to describe anything. Distaste for the kind of words employed by Tamsin and Lola made him impotent with revulsion and anger. Cliché spread like a stain across the written world, and he didn’t know a technique for expunging it. Nor had he the skill to do what Leonardo said we should do with cracks, or Constable with cloud-forms, and make the stains into new, suggested forms.

  CICELY FOX DID NOT COME to the pub with the rest of the class. Jack could not offer to drive her home, for the idea of her frail bony form on his motor bike was impossible. He realised he was trying to think of ways to get to talk to her, as though she had been a pretty girl.

  The best he could do was to sit next to her in the coffee break in the church. This was hard, because everyone wanted his attention. On the other hand, because of her deafness perhaps, she sat slightly separate from the others, so he could move next to her. But then he had to shout.

  “I was wondering what you read, Miss Fox?”

  “Oh, the old things. They wouldn’t interest you young people. Things I used to like as a girl. Poetry increasingly. I find I don’t seem to want to read novels much any more.”

  “I’d put you down as a reader of Jane Austen.”

  “Had you?” she said vaguely. “I suppose you would,” she added, without revealing whether or not she liked Jane Austen. He felt snubbed. He said:

  “Which poems, Miss Fox?”

  “These days, mostly George Herbert.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “No. He is the only writer who makes me regret that for a moment. He makes one understand grace. Also, he is good on dust.”

  “Dust?” He dredged his memory and came up with “Who sweeps a room as for thy laws/Makes that and the action fine.”

  “I like Church Monuments. With death sweeping dust with an incessant motion.

  “Flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

  “And then I like the poem where he speaks of his God stretching ‘a crumme of dust from Hell to Heaven.’ Or . . .

  “O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue to cry to thee

  And then not heare it crying.

  “He knew,” said Cicely Fox, “the proper relation between words and things. Dust is a good word.”

  He tried to ask her how this fitted into her writing, but she appeared to have retreated again, after this small burst of speech, into her deafness.

  Wash Day

  In those days, washing took all the week. We boiled on Monday, starched on Tuesday, dried on Wednesday, ironed on Thursday, and mended on Friday. Besides all the other things there were to do. We washed outside, in the wash-house, which was an outhouse, with its own stone sink, hand pump, copper with a fire beneath it, and flagged floor. Other implements were the monstrous mangle, the great galvanised tubs, and the ponch. Our wash-house was made of stone blocks with a slate roof, and houseleeks growing on the roof. Its chimney smoked, and its windows steamed over. In winter, the steam melted the ice. It was full of extremes of watery climate. As a child, I used to put my face against the stones and find them hot to touch, or anyway warmish, on wash day. I pretended it was the witch’s cottage in fairy-tales.

  First there was sorting and boiling. You boiled whites in the copper, which was a huge rounded vat with a wooden lid. All the
wood in the wash-house was soap-slippery, both flaked apart and held together by melted and congealed soap. You boiled the whites—sheets, pillowcases, table-cloths, napkins, tea-towels and so on, and then you used the boiled water, let down a bit, in the tubs, to wash the more delicate things, or the coloured things which might run. You had heavy wooden pincers and poles to stir the whites in the boiling water; steam came off in clouds, and a kind of grey scum formed on the surface. When they were boiled they went through various rinses in tubs. There was a hiss and a slopping as the hot cloth hit the freezing water in the tubs. Then you ponched it. The ponch was a kind of copper kettle-like thing on a long pole, full of holes like a vast tea-infuser, or closed colander. It soughed and sucked at the cloth in the water, leaving little bosses of pulled damask or cotton where it had impressed itself and clung. Then with pincers—and your bare arms—you hoisted all the weight of the sheets from one tub to another tub to another. And then you folded the streaming stuff and wound it through the wooden jaw-rollers of the mangle. The mangle had red wheels to turn the rollers, and a polished wooden handle to turn the wheel. It sluiced soapy water back into an under-tub, or splashed it on the floor. You were also always pumping more water—yanking the pump-handle, winding the mangle-handle. You froze, you were scalded. You stood in clouds of steam and breathed an air which was always full of a thick sweat—your own sweat, with the effort, and the odour of the dirt from the clothes that was being released into the air and the water.

  Then there were the things you had to pull the washed clothes through, or soak them in. There was Reckitt’s Blue. I don’t know what that was made of. Because we lived in Derbyshire I always associated it with blue john, from the Peaks, which I know is quite wrong, but is a verbal association which has lingered. It came in little cylindrical bags, wrapped in white muslin, and produced an intense cobalt colour when the little bags were swirled in the blue rinsing water. What went through the blue water (which was always cold) were the whites. I don’t know by what optical process this blue staining made the whites whiter, but I can clearly remember that it did. It wasn’t bleach. It didn’t remove recalcitrant stains of tea, or urine, or strawberry juice—you had to use real bleach for that, which smelled evil and deathly. The Reckitt’s Blue went out into the water in little clouds and fibrils, and tendrils of colour. Like fine threads of glass in glass marbles. Or blood, if you put a cut finger in a dish of water. You couldn’t see it very well in the galvanised tubs, but on days when there wasn’t too much we used to do the blueing in a white enamel panshon, and then you could see the threading cloud of bright blue going into the clear water, and mingling, until the water was blue. Then you swirled the cloth in the blue water—swirled it, and squashed it, and punched and mashed it, until it was impregnated with blue, until all the white glistened in pale blueness. As a very little girl, I used to think the white cloth and the blue water were like clouds in the sky, but this was silly. Because in fact in the sky, the white watery clouds stain the blue, not the other way round. It was an inversion, a draining. For when you held up the sheets, and took them from the blue water to drain them, you could see the blue run away and the white whiter, blue-white, a different white from cream, or ivory, or scorched-yellow white, a white under blue dripping liquid that had been changed, but not dyed.

  Then there was starch. Starch was viscous and gluey, it thickened the washing-water like gruel. I suppose it was a kind of gruel, if you think of it. Farinaceous molecules expanding in heat.

  Starch was slippery and reminded all of us of substances we didn’t like to think of—bodily fluids and products—though in fact, it is an innocent, clean, vegetable thing, unlike soap, which is compressed mutton fat, however perfumed. Cloth slipped into starch, and was coated with it. There were degrees of starching. Very dense, glutinous starch for shirt collars. Light, spun-glass starch for delicate nightdresses and knickers. When you hoisted a garment out of a bath of starch it stiffened and fell into flutes like a carving—or if by mistake you left it lying around, anyhow, and it dried out, it would become solid crumples and lumps, like pleated stones where the earth had folded on itself. Starch had to be ironed damp. The smell of the hot iron on the jelly was like a parody of cooking. Gluten, I suppose. You could smell scorching as you could smell burning cakes. You had a nose for things not as they should be.

  Clothes in the process of being cleansed haunted our lives. They were accompanying angels, souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb, surrounding us with their rustle and their pale scent. In the eighteenth century, I imagine, wash days happened once or twice a year, but our time was obsessed with cleansing and had not invented mechanical helpers. We went through an endless cycle of bubble, toil and trouble, surrounded by an only too visible inanimate host. They danced in the wind, fluttering vain arms, raising full-bellied skirts to reveal vacancy, coiling round each other like white worms. Indoors, they hung in the kitchen on long racks, winched up to the ceiling, from where they then dangled, stiff as boards, like shrouded hanging men. They lay neatly folded, before and after ironing, like dead choirboys in effigy, fluted and frilled. Under the hot iron (on Thursdays) they writhed and winced and shrank. My great-aunt’s huge shapeless rayon petticoats flared all colours of the rainbow, spectral, sizzling russets and air-force blues, shot with copper, shot with peacock blue. They melted easily, gophering into scabs which resolved themselves into pin-holes and were unredeemable. The irons were filled with hot coals from the kitchen range. They were heavy; they had to be watched for soot-smears which would condemn a garment to an immediate return to the washpot. Inside them the coals of fire smouldered, spat and dimmed. The kitchen was full of the smell of singeing, a tawny smell, a parody of the good golden cooking smells of buns and biscuits.

  It was hard work, but work was life. Work was coiled and woven into breathing and sleeping and eating, as the shirt-sleeves coiled and wove themselves into a tangle with nightdress ribbons and Sunday sashes. In her old age my mother sat beside a twin-tub washing machine, a mechanical reduction of all those archaic containers and hoists and pulleys, and lifted her underwear and pillowcases from wash to rinse to spin with the same wooden pincers. She was arthritic and bird-boned, like a cross seagull. She was offered a new machine with a porthole, which would wash and dry a little every day, and, it was thought, relieve her. She was appalled and distressed. She said she would feel dirty—she would feel bad—if she had no wash day. She needed steam and stirring to convince her that she was alive and virtuous. Towards the end, the increasing number of soiled sheets defeated her, and perhaps even killed her, though I think she died, not from overexertion, but from chagrin when she finally had to admit she could no longer wield her ponch or lift a bucket. She felt unnecessary. She had a new white nightdress which she had washed, starched, ironed, and never worn, ready to shroud her still white flesh in her coffin, its Reckitt’s Blue glinting now livelier than the shrunken, bruised yellow-grey of her eyelids and lips.

  The creative writing class liked this slightly sinister study of cleanliness no better than its predecessor. They introduced the word “overwritten” into their remorseless criticisms. Jack Smollett reflected, not for the first time, that there was an element of kindergarten regression in all adult classes. Group behaviour took over, gangs formed, victims were selected. There were intense jealousies over the teacher’s attention, and intense resentments of any show of partiality from the teacher. Cicely Fox was becoming a “teacher’s pet.” Nobody had much spoken to her in the coffee breaks before Jack’s enthusiasm for her work became apparent, but now there was deliberate cutting, and cold-shouldering.

  Jack himself knew what he ought to do, or have done. He should have kept his enthusiasm quiet. Or quieter. He was not quite sure why it mattered to him so much to insist that Cicely Fox’s writings were the real thing, the thing itself, to the detriment of good order and goodwill. He felt he was standing up for something, like an ancient Wesleyan bearing witness. The “something” was writing, not Miss Fox he
rself. She dealt with the criticism of her adjectives, the suggestions for livening things up, by smiling vaguely and benignly, nodding occasionally. But Jack felt that he had been teaching something muddy, an illegitimate therapy, and suddenly here was writing. Miss Fox’s brief essays made Jack want to write. They made him see the world as something to be written. Lola Secrett’s pout was an object of delighted study: the right words would be found to distinguish it from all other pouts. He wanted to describe the taste of the nasty coffee, and the slope of the headstones in the graveyard. He loved the whirling nastiness of the class because— perhaps—he could write it.

  He tried to behave equitably. He made a point of not sitting next to Cicely Fox in the coffee break of the Wash Day session, but went and talked to Bobby Forster and Rosy Wheelwright. His new remorseless writer’s conscience knew that there was something wrong with all Bobby Forster’s sentences, a limping rhythm, an involuntary echo of other writers, a note like the clunk of a piano key when the string is dead. But he was interested in Bobby Forster, his mixture of jauntiness and fear, his intense interest in every event of his own daily activities, which was, after all, writerly. Bobby Forster said he’d sent away for the entrance forms for a competition for new writers in the literary supplement of a Sunday paper. There was a big prize—£2000—and the promise of publication, with the further promise of interest from publishers.

  Bobby Forster said he thought he stood a pretty good chance of getting some attention. “I’ve been thinking I ought to move on from being a literary Learner Driver, you know.” Jack Smollett grinned and agreed.

  When he got home, he typed up “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves” and “Wash Day” and sent them to the newspaper. The entries had to be submitted under a pseudonym. He chose Jane Temple for Cicely Fox. Jane for Austen, Temple for Herbert. He waited, and in due course received the letter he had never really expected not to receive—all this was fated. Cicely Fox had won the competition. She should get in touch with the newspaper, in order to arrange printing, prize-giving, an interview.