The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

Rory stared at her. She had never said anything like this before. ‘What about Vesuvi?’ he asked, regretting it even as he spoke.

  ‘Vesuvi won’t hire me. You know it perfectly well.’

  She was smiling at him, and Rory felt as if she had peered into the lying depths of his soul. ‘Vesuvi doesn’t know shit,’ he said, but it sounded lame even to himself.

  Stacey slid open the window and climbed out onto the fire escape. The sky was a strange, sulfurous yellow – beautiful, yet seemingly disconnected from nature. The shabby tree behind Rory’s building was empty of leaves, and made a pattern of cracked glass against the sky. Stacey drank her Coke in tiny, careful sips. Rory stood helplessly inside the window, watching her. He needed to say something to her, he knew that, but he wasn’t sure how.

  He shook a cigarette from his pack and placed it in his mouth. Charles was working on a second steak. ‘By the way,’ Charles said, pointing with his chin at a spot near Rory’s head, ‘I baked us a cake – a real one.’

  Rory turned in surprise and lifted a plate from above the refrigerator. It was a tall, elegant cake with giant dollops of whipped cream along its edges. ‘Charles,’ Rory said, confused, ‘haven’t you been doing this all week?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Charles said, ‘but always for strangers. And never to eat.’

  He bent over the steak, his blowtorch hissing on the damp meat. He looked embarrassed, as if his preference for real cake were a weakness he rarely confided. Charles’s honesty shamed Rory – he said what he felt, not caring how it sounded.

  Rory climbed out the window and sat beside Stacey. The bars of the fire escape felt cold through his jeans. Stacey held her Coke in one hand and took Rory’s hand in the other. They looked at the yellow sky and held hands tightly, as if something were about to happen.

  Rory’s heart beat quickly. ‘So maybe it doesn’t work,’ he said. ‘The modeling. Maybe that just won’t happen.’

  He searched her face for some sign of surprise, but there was none. She watched him calmly, and for the first time Rory felt that Stacey was older than he, that her mind contained things he knew nothing of. She stood up and handed her Coke to Rory. Then she grasped the railing of the fire escape and lifted her body into a handstand. Rory held his breath, watching in alarmed amazement as the slender wand of her body swayed against the yellow sky. She had no trouble balancing, and hovered there for what seemed a long time before finally bending at the waist, lowering her feet, and standing straight again.

  ‘If it doesn’t work,’ she said, ‘then I’ll see the world some other way.’

  She took Rory’s face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth – hard, with the fierce, tender urgency of someone about to board a train. Then she turned and looked at the sky. Rory stared at her, oddly frightened to think that she would do it, she would find some way. He pictured Stacey in a distant place, looking back on him, on this world of theirs as if it were a bright, glittering dream she had once believed in.

  ‘Take me with you,’ he said.

  The Snobs

  Muriel Spark

  Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a Scottish novelist best known for her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In 2008 The Times named her in its list of the ‘50 Greatest British Writers since 1945’. Spark was twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was awarded the Golden PEN Award in 1998 by English PEN for her service to literature. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

  Snob: A person who sets too much value on social standing, wishing to be associated with the upper class and their mores, and treating those viewed as inferior with condescension and contempt – Chambers Dictionary.

  I feel bound to quote the above definition, it so well fits the Ringer-Smith couple whom I knew in the nineteen-fifties and of whom I have since met variations and versions enough to fill me with wonder. Snobs are really amazing. They mainly err in failing to fool the very set of people they are hoping to be accepted by, and above all, to seem to belong to, to be taken for. They may live in a democratic society – it does nothing to help. Nothing.

  Of the Ringer-Smith couple, he, Jake, was the more snobbish. She, at least, had a certain natural serenity of behaviour which she herself never questioned. She was in fact rather smug. Her background was of small land-owning farmers and minor civil servants. She, Marion, was stingy, stingy as hell. Jake also had a civil service background and, on the mother’s side, a family of fruit export-import affairs which had not left her very well off, the inheritance having been absorbed by the male members of the family. Jake and Marion were a fairly suitable match. He was slightly the shorter of the two. Both were skinny. They had no children. Skeletons in the family cupboard do nothing to daunt the true snob, in fact they provoke a certain arrogance, and this was the case with Jake. A family scandal on a national scale had grown to an international one. A spectacular bank robbery with murder on the part of a brother had resulted in the family name being reduced to a byword in every household. The delinquent Ringer-Smith and his associates had escaped to a safe exile in South America leaving Jake and his ageing mother to face the music of the press and TV reporters. Nobody would have taken it out on them in the normal way if it had not been for the contempt with which they treated police, journalists, interrogators, functionaries of the law and the public in general. They put on airs suggesting that they were untouchably ‘good family’, and they generally carried on as if they were earls and marquises instead of ordinary middle-class people. No earl, no marquis at present alive would in fact be so haughty unless he were completely out of his mind or perhaps an unfortunate drug addict or losing gambler.

  I was staying with some friends at a château near Dijon when the Ringer-Smiths turned up. This was in the nineties. I hardly recognized them. The Ringer-Smiths had not just turned up at the château, they were found by Anne, bewildered, outside the village shop, puzzling over a map, uncertain of their way to anywhere. Warming towards their plight as she always would towards those in trouble, Anne invited these lost English people for a cup of tea at the château where they could work out their route.

  Anne and Monty, English themselves, had lived in the château for the last eight years. It was a totally unexpected inheritance from the last member of a distant branch of Monty’s family. The house and small fortune that went with it came to him in his early fifties as an enormous surprise. He had been a shoe salesman and a bus driver, among other things. Anne had been a stockbroker’s secretary. Their two children, both girls, were married and away. The ‘fairy tale’ story of their inheritance was in the newspapers for a day, but it wasn’t everybody who read the passing news.

  Monty was out when Anne brought home the Ringer-Smiths. I was watching the television – some programme which now escapes me for ever due to the shock of seeing those people. Anne, tall, merry, blonded-up and carrying her sixties well, took herself off to the kitchen to put on the kettle. She had made the sitting-room as much like England as possible.

  ‘Who does this place belong to?’ Jake inquired of me as soon as Anne was out of the room. Obviously, he had not recognized me in the present context, although I felt Marion’s eyes upon me in a penetrating stare of puzzlement, of quasi-remembrance.

  ‘It belongs,’ I said, ‘to the lady who invited you to tea.’

  ‘Oh!’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t we met?’ Marion was speaking to me.

  ‘Yes, you have.’ I made myself known.

  ‘What brings you here?’ said Jake outright.

  ‘The same as brings you here. I was invited.’

  Anne returned with the tea, served with a silver tea service and pretty china cups. She carried the tray while a young girl who was helping in the house followed with hot water and a plate of biscuits.

  ‘You speak English very well,’ Jake said.

  ‘Oh, we are English,’ said Anne. ‘But we live in France now. My husband inherited the château from his family on his mother’s side, the Martineaus.’

&nbs
p; ‘Oh, of course,’ said Jake.

  The factor came in from the farm and took a cup of tea standing up. He addressed Anne as ‘Madame’.

  Anne was already regretting her impulse in asking the couple to tea. They said very little but just sat on. She was afraid they would miss the last bus to the station. Looking at me, she said, ‘The last bus goes at six, doesn’t it?’

  I said to Marion, ‘You don’t want to miss the last bus.’

  ‘Could we see round the château?’ said Marion. ‘The guidebook says it’s fourteenth century.’

  ‘Well, not all of it is.’ said Anne. ‘But today is a bit difficult. We don’t, you know, open the house to the public. We live in it.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ve met,’ said Marion to Anne, as if this took care of their catching the last bus – a point which was not lost on Anne. Kindly though she was I knew she hated to have to ferry people by car to the station and take on other chores she was not prepared for. I could see, already in Anne’s mind, the thought: ‘I have to get rid of these people or they’ll stay for dinner and then all night. They are château-grabbers.’

  Anne had often lamented to me about the château-grabbers of her later life. People who didn’t want to know her when she was obscure and a bus driver’s wife now wanted to know her intimately. Monty didn’t care much about this, one way or another. But then the work of organizing meals and entertaining in style fell more on Anne than on Monty, who mostly spent his time helping the factor in the grounds, game-keeping and forest-clearing.

  Anne could see that the English couple she had invited in ‘for a cup of tea’ were clingers, climbers, general nuisances, and she especially cast a look of desperation at me when Marion Ringer-Smith said, ‘I’m sure we’ve met.’

  ‘You think so?’ Anne said. She had got up and was leading the way to the back door. ‘This is the Cour des Adieus,’ she said; ‘it leads quicker to your bus stop.’ Marion stooped and took a cake as if it was her last chance of ever eating a cake again.

  I was at this moment coming to the end of a novel I was writing. Anne had offered me the peace and quiet of French château life and the informality of her own life-style which made it an ideal arrangement. She had also undertaken to type out the novel from any handwritten manuscripts on to a word-processor. But now at a quarter to six, I could see the rest of our afternoon’s plans slipping away.

  I doubted that Marion had indeed seen Anne before. It was by some mental process of transference that she had picked on Anne. The one she had actually met was myself, but she wasn’t very much aware of it. After a gap of forty years, she remembered very little of me.

  Jake Ringer-Smith asked if he could use the bathroom. Oh, you bore, I thought. Why don’t you go? There are trees and thick bushes all the way down the drive for you to pee on. But no, he had to be shown the bathroom. It was nearly ten minutes to their bus time. Jake kicked his backpack over to his wife and said, ‘Take this, will you?’

  ‘I would really like to see round the château,’ Marion said, ‘while we’re here and since we’ve come all this way.’

  I had come across this situation before. There are people who will hold up a party of tired and worn fellow travellers just because they have to see a pulpit. There are people who will arrive an hour late for dinner with the excuse that they had to see over some art gallery on the way. Marion was very much one of those. If challenged she would have thought nothing of pointing out that, after all, she had paid a plane fare to arrive at where she was. I remember Marion’s shapeless cheesecloth dress and her worn sandals and Jake’s baggy, ostentatiously patched, grubby trousers, their avidity to get on intimate terms with the lady of the house, to be invited to supper and, no doubt, to spend the night. I was really sorry for Anne who, I was aware, was sorry for herself and most of all regretting her own impulsive invitation to a cup of tea in her house.

  Anne kept a soup kitchen in a building some way from the house, beyond a vegetable garden. She was pledged, I knew, to be there and help whenever possible, at six-thhty every evening. Laboriously, she explained this to the Ringer-Smiths. ‘…otherwise I’d have been glad to show you the house, not that there’s much to see.’

  ‘Soup kitchen!’ said Jake. ‘May we join it for a bowl of soup? Then perhaps we can stretch out our sleeping-bag for the night under one of your charming archways and see the house tomorrow.’

  Does this sound like a nightmare? It was a nightmare. Nothing could throw off these people.

  Down at the soup kitchen that evening, dispensing slabs of bread and cheese with bowls of tomato soup, I was not surprised to see the Ringer-Smiths appear.

  ‘We belong to the lower orders.’ he said to me with an exaggeratedly self-effacing grin that meant. ‘We do not belong to any lower orders and just see how grand we really are – we don’t care what we look like or what company we keep. We are Us.’

  In fact they looked positively shifty among the genuine skin-and-bone tramps and hairy drop-outs and bulging bag-ladies. I dished out their portions to them without a smile. They had missed the last bus. Somehow, Anne and Monty had to arrange for them to have a bedroom for the night. ‘We stayed at the château Leclaire de Martineau at Dijon’ I could hear them telling their friends.

  Before breakfast I advised Anne and Monty to make themselves scarce. ‘Otherwise,’ I said, ‘you’ll never get rid of them. Leave them to me.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Marion, ‘I’ve met Anne before. But I can’t tell where.’

  ‘She has been a cook in many houses,’ I said. ‘And Monty has been a butler.’

  ‘A cook and a butler?’ said Jake.

  ‘Yes, the master and mistress are away from home at present.’

  ‘But she told me she was the owner,’ Marion said, indicating the dining-room door with her head.

  ‘Oh no, you must be mistaken.’

  ‘But I’m sure she said—’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘What a pity you can’t see over the château. Such lovely pictures. But the Comtesse will be here at any moment. I don’t know how you will explain yourselves. So far as I know you haven’t been invited.’

  ‘Oh we have,’ said Jake. ‘The servants begged us to stay. So typical, posing as the lord and lady of the manor! But it’s getting late, we’ll miss the bus.’

  They were off within four minutes, tramping down the drive with their bulging packs.

  Anne and Monty were delighted when I told them how it was done. Anne was sure, judging from a previous experience, that the intruders had planned to stay for a week.

  ‘What else can you do with people like that?’ said Anne.

  ‘Put them in a story if you are me,’ I said. ‘And sell the story.’

  ‘Can they sue?’

  ‘Let them sue,’ I said. ‘Let them go ahead, stand up, and say Yes, that was Us.’

  ‘An eccentric couple. They took the soap with them,’ said Anne.

  Monty went off about his business with a smile. So did Anne, And I, too. Or so I thought.

  It was eleven-thirty, two hours later that morning, when, looking out of the window of my room as I often do when I am working on a novel, I saw them again under one of the trees bordering a lawn. They were looking up towards the house.

  I had no idea where Monty and Anne were at that moment, nor could I think how to locate the factor, Raoul, or his wife, Marie-Louise. This was a disturbance in the rhythm of my morning’s work, but I decided to go down and see what was the matter. As soon as they saw me Marion said, ‘Oh hallo. We decided it was uncivil of us to leave without seeing the lady of the house and paying our respects.’

  ‘We’ll wait till the Comtesse arrives,’ Jake stated.

  ‘Well, you’re unlucky,’ I said. ‘I believe there’s word come through that she’ll be away for a week.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Marion. ‘We can spare a week.’

  ‘Only civil…’ said Jake.

  I managed to alert Anne before she saw them. They were very
cool to her when she did at last appear before them. ‘The Comtesse would, I’m sure, be offended if we left without a word of thanks,’ said Jake.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Anne. ‘In fact, you have to go.’

  ‘Not so,’ said Marion.

  Raoul tackled them, joined by Monty. Marion had already reclaimed their bedroom. ‘As the beds had to be changed anyway,’ she said, ‘we may as well stay on. We don’t mind eating down at the shed.’ By this she meant the soup kitchen. ‘We are not above eating with the proletariat,’ said Jake.

  Raoul and I searched the house, every drawer, for a key to the door of their bedroom. Eventually we found one that fitted and succeeded in locking them out. Monty took their packs and dumped them outside the gates of the château. These operations took place while they were feeding in the soup kitchen. We all five (Marie-Louise had joined us) confronted them and told them what we had done.

  What happened to them after that none of us quite knows. We do know that they went to retrieve their bags and found themselves locked out by the factor. Anne received a letter, correctly addressed to her as the Comtesse, from Jake, indignantly complaining about the treatment they had received at the hands of the ‘staff’.

  ‘Something,’ wrote Jake, ‘told me not to accept their invitation. I knew instinctively that they were not one of us. I should have listened to my instincts. People like them are such frightful snobs.’

  Third Floor Rising

  Hilary Mantel

  Hilary Mantel (b. 1952) is a British writer who has twice been awarded the Man Booker Prize. She won her first Booker for the 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, and her second, in 2012, for Bring Up the Bodies, making her the first woman to receive the award twice. She has published twelve novels and one collection of short stories, Learning to Talk.

  The summer of my eighteenth birthday I had my first job. It was to fill the time between leaving school and going away to university in London. The previous summer I’d been old enough to work, but I had to stay at home and mind the children, while my mother pursued her glittering career.