The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  At once she knew that something was happening – outdoors, in the street, the whole of London, the world. An advance, an extraordinary movement was silently taking place; blue-white beams overflowed from it, silting, dropping round the edges of the muffling black-out curtains. When, starting up, she knocked a fold of the curtain, a beam like a mouse ran across her bed. A searchlight, the most powerful of all time, might have been turned full and steady upon her defended window; finding flaws in the black-out stuff, it made veins and stars. Once gained by this idea of pressure she could not lie down again; she sat tautly, drawn-up knees touching her breasts, and asked herself if there were anything she should do. She parted the curtains, opened them slowly wider, looked out – and was face to face with the moon.

  Below the moon, the houses opposite her window blazed back in transparent shadow; and something – was it a coin or a ring? – glittered half-way across the chalk-white street. Light marched in past her face, and she turned to see where it went: out stood the curves and garlands of the great white marble Victorian mantelpiece of that lost drawing-room; out stood, in the photographs turned her way, the thoughts with which her parents had faced the camera, and the humble puzzlement of her two dogs at home. Of silver brocade, just faintly purpled with roses, became her house-coat hanging over the chair. And the moon did more: it exonerated and beautified the lateness of the lovers’ return. No wonder, she said to herself, no wonder – if this was the world they walked in, if this was whom they were with. Having drunk in the white explanation, Callie lay down again. Her half of the bed was in shadow, but she allowed one hand to lie, blanched, in what would be Pepita’s place. She lay and looked at the hand until it was no longer her own.

  Callie woke to the sound of Pepita’s key in the latch. But no voices? What had happened? Then she heard Arthur’s step. She heard his unslung equipment dropped with a weary, dull sound, and the plonk of his tin hat on a wooden chair. ‘Sssh-sssh!’ Pepita exclaimed, ‘she might be asleep!’

  Then at last Arthur’s voice: ‘But I thought you said –’

  ‘I’m not asleep; I’m just coming!’ Callie called out with rapture, leaping out from her form in shadow into the moonlight, zipping on her enchanted house-coat over her nightdress, kicking her shoes on, and pinning in place, with a trembling firmness, her plaits in their coronet round her head. Between these movements of hers she heard not another sound. Had she only dreamed they were there? Her heart beat: she stepped through the living-room, shutting her door behind her.

  Pepita and Arthur stood the other side of the table; they gave the impression of being lined up. Their faces, at different levels – for Pepita’s rough, dark head came only an inch above Arthur’s khaki shoulder – were alike in abstention from any kind of expression; as though, spiritually, they both still refused to be here. Their features looked faint, weathered – was this the work of the moon? Pepita said at once: ‘I suppose we are very late?’

  ‘I don’t wonder,’ Callie said, ‘on this lovely night.’

  Arthur had not raised his eyes; he was looking at the three cups. Pepita now suddenly jogged his elbow, saying, ‘Arthur, wake up; say something; this is Callie – well, Callie, this is Arthur, of course.’

  ‘Why, yes of course this is Arthur,’ returned Callie, whose candid eyes since she entered had not left Arthur’s face. Perceiving that Arthur did not know what to do, she advanced round the table to shake hands with him. He looked up, she looked down, for the first time: she rather beheld than felt his red-brown grip on what still seemed her glove of moonlight. ‘Welcome, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad to meet you at last. I hope you will be comfortable in the flat.’

  ‘It’s been kind of you,’ he said after consideration.

  ‘Please do not feel that,’ said Callie. ‘This is Pepita’s home, too, and we both hope – don’t we, Pepita? – that you’ll regard it as yours. Please feel free to do just as you like. I am sorry it is so small.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Arthur said, as though hypnotized; ‘it seems a nice little place.’

  Pepita, meanwhile, glowered and turned away.

  Arthur continued to wonder, though he had once been told, how these two unalike girls had come to set up together – Pepita so small, except for her too-big head, compact of childish brusqueness and of unchildish passion, and Callie, so sedate, waxy and tall – an unlit candle. Yes, she was like one of those candles on sale outside a church; there could be something votive even in her demeanour. She was unconscious that her good manners, those of an old fashioned country doctor’s daughter, were putting the other two at a disadvantage. He found himself touched by the grave good faith with which Callie was wearing that tartish house-coat, above which her face kept the glaze of sleep; and, as she knelt to relight the gas-ring under the kettle, he marked the strong, delicate arch of one bare foot, disappearing into the arty green shoe. Pepita was now too near him ever again to be seen as he now saw Callie – in a sense, he never had seen Pepita for the first time: she had not been, and still sometimes was not, his type. No, he had not thought of her twice; he had not remembered her until he began to remember her with passion. You might say he had not seen Pepita coming: their love had been a collision in the dark.

  Callie, determined to get this over, knelt back and said: ‘Would Arthur like to wash his hands?’ When they had heard him stumble down the half-flight of stairs, she said to Pepita: ‘Yes, I was so glad you had the moon.’

  ‘Why?’ said Pepita. She added: ‘There was too much of it.’

  ‘You’re tired. Arthur looks tired, too.’

  ‘How would you know? He’s used to marching about. But it’s all this having no place to go.’

  ‘But, Pepita, you –’

  But at this point Arthur came back: from the door he noticed the wireless, and went direct to it. ‘Nothing much on now, I suppose?’ he doubtfully said.

  ‘No; you see it’s past midnight; we’re off the air. And, anyway, in this house they don’t like the wireless late. By the same token,’ went on Callie, friendly smiling, ‘I’m afraid I must ask you, Arthur, to take your boots off, unless, of course, you mean to stay sitting down. The people below us –’

  Pepita flung off, saying something under her breath, but Arthur, remarking, ‘No, I don’t mind,’ both sat down and began to take off his boots. Pausing, glancing to left and right at the divan’s fresh cotton spread, he said: ‘It’s all right is it, for me to sit on this?’

  ‘That’s my bed,’ said Pepita. ‘You are to sleep in it.’

  Callie then made the cocoa, after which they turned in. Preliminary trips to the bathroom having been worked out, Callie was first to retire, shutting the door behind her so that Pepita and Arthur might kiss each other good night. When Pepita joined her, it was without knocking: Pepita stood still in the moon and began to tug off her clothes. Glancing with hate at the bed, she asked: ‘Which side?’

  ‘I expected you’d like the outside.’

  ‘What are you standing about for?’

  ‘I don’t really know: as I’m inside I’d better get in first.’

  ‘Then why not get in?’

  When they had settled rigidly, side by side, Callie asked: ‘Do you think Arthur’s got all he wants?’

  Pepita jerked her head up. ‘We can’t sleep in all this moon.’

  ‘Why, you don’t believe the moon does things, actually?’

  ‘Well, it couldn’t hope to make some of us much more screwy.’

  Callie closed the curtains, then said: ‘What do you mean? And – didn’t you hear? – I asked if Arthur’s got all he wants.’

  ‘That’s what I meant – have you got a screw loose, really?’

  ‘Pepita, I won’t stay here if you’re going to be like this.’

  ‘In that case, you had better go in with Arthur.’

  ‘What about me?’ Arthur loudly said through the wall. ‘I can hear practically all you girls are saying.’

  They were both startled – rather
that than abashed. Arthur, alone in there, had thrown off the ligatures of his social manner: his voice held the whole authority of his sex – he was impatient, sleepy, and he belonged to no one.

  ‘Sorry,’ the girls said in unison. Then Pepita laughed soundlessly, making their bed shake, till to stop herself she bit the back of her hand, and this movement made her elbow strike Callie’s cheek. ‘Sorry,’ she had to whisper. No answer: Pepita fingered her elbow and found, yes, it was quite true, it was wet. ‘Look, shut up crying, Callie: what have I done?’

  Callie rolled right round, in order to press her forehead closely under the window, into the curtains, against the wall. Her weeping continued to be soundless: now and then, unable to reach her handkerchief, she staunched her eyes with a curtain, disturbing slivers of moon. Pepita gave up marvelling, and soon slept: at least there is something in being dog-tired.

  A clock struck four as Callie woke up again – but something else had made her open her swollen eyelids. Arthur, stumbling about on his padded feet, could be heard next door attempting to make no noise. Inevitably, he bumped the edge of the table. Callie sat up: by her side Pepita lay like a mummy rolled half over, in forbidding, tenacious sleep. Arthur groaned. Callie caught a breath, climbed lightly over Pepita, felt for her torch on the mantelpiece, stopped to listen again. Arthur groaned again: Callie, with movements soundless as they were certain, opened the door and slipped through to the living-room. ‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘No; I just got a cigarette. Did I wake you up?’

  ‘But you groaned.’

  ‘I’m sorry; I’d no idea.’

  ‘But do you often?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, really, I tell you,’ Arthur repeated. The air of the room was dense with his presence, overhung by tobacco. He must be sitting on the edge of his bed, wrapped up in his overcoat – she could smell the coat, and each time he pulled on the cigarette his features appeared down there, in the fleeting, dull reddish glow. ‘Where are you?’ he said. ‘Show a light.’

  Her nervous touch on her torch, like a reflex to what he said, made it flicker up for a second. ‘I am just by the door; Pepita’s asleep; I’d better go back to bed.’

  ‘Listen. Do you two get on each other’s nerves?’

  ‘Not till tonight,’ said Callie, watching the uncertain swoops of the cigarette as he reached across to the ashtray on the edge of the table. Shifting her bare feet patiently, she added: ‘You don’t see us as we usually are.’

  ‘She’s a girl who shows things in funny ways – I expect she feels bad at our putting you out like this – I know I do. But then we’d got no choice, had we?’

  ‘It is really I who am putting you out,’ said Callie.

  ‘Well, that can’t be helped either, can it? You had the right to stay in your own place. If there’d been more time, we might have gone to the country, though I still don’t see where we’d have gone there. It’s one harder when you’re not married, unless you’ve got the money. Smoke?’

  ‘No, thank you. Well, if you’re all right, I’ll go back to bed.’

  ‘I’m glad she’s asleep – funny the way she sleeps, isn’t it? You can’t help wondering where she is. You haven’t got a boy, have you, just at present?’

  ‘No. I’ve never had one.’

  ‘I’m not sure in one way that you’re not better off. I can see there’s not so much in it for a girl these days. It makes me feel cruel the way I unsettle her: I don’t know how much it’s me myself or how much it’s something the matter that I can’t help. How are any of us to know how things could have been? They forget war’s not just only war; it’s years out of people’s lives that they’ve never had before and won’t have again. Do you think she’s fanciful?’

  ‘Who, Pepita?’

  ‘It’s enough to make her – tonight was the pay-off. We couldn’t get near any movie or any place for sitting; you had to fight into the bars, and she hates the staring in bars, and with all that milling about, every street we went, they kept on knocking her even off my arm. So then we took the tube to that park down there, but the place was as bad as daylight, let alone it was cold. We hadn’t the nerve – well, that’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Or else you don’t understand. So we began to play – we were off in Kôr.’

  ‘Core of what?’

  ‘Mysterious Kôr – ghost city.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You may ask. But I could have sworn she saw it, and from the way she saw it I saw it, too. A game’s a game, but what’s a hallucination? You begin by laughing, then it gets in you and you can’t laugh it off. I tell you, I woke up just now not knowing where I’d been; and I had to get up and feel round this table before I even knew where I was. It wasn’t till then that I thought of a cigarette. Now I see why she sleeps like that, if that’s where she goes.’

  ‘But she is just as often restless; I often hear her.’

  ‘Then she doesn’t always make it. Perhaps it takes me, in some way – Well, I can’t see any harm: when two people have got no place, why not want Kôr, as a start? There are no restrictions on wanting, at any rate.’

  ‘But, oh, Arthur, can’t wanting want what’s human?’

  He yawned. ‘To be human’s to be at a dead loss.’ Stopping yawning, he ground out his cigarette: the china tray skidded at the edge of the table. ‘Bring that light here a moment – that is, will you? I think I’ve messed ash all over these sheets of hers.’

  Callie advanced with the torch alight, but at arm’s length: now and then her thumb made the beam wobble. She watched the lit-up inside of Arthur’s hand as he brushed the sheet; and once he looked up to see her white-nightgowned figure curving above and away from him, behind the arc of light. ‘What’s that swinging?’

  ‘One of my plaits of hair. Shall I open the window wider?’

  ‘What, to let the smoke out? Go on. And how’s your moon?‘

  ‘Mine?’ Marvelling over this, as the first sign that Arthur remembered that she was Callie, she uncovered the window, pushed up the sash, then after a minute said: ‘Not so strong.’

  Indeed, the moon’s power over London and the imagination had now declined. The siege of light had relaxed; the search was over; the street had a look of survival and no more. Whatever had glittered there, coin or ring, was now invisible or had gone. To Callie it seemed likely that there would never be such a moon again; and on the whole she felt this was for the best. Feeling air reach in like a tired arm round her body, she dropped the curtains against it and returned to her own room.

  Back by her bed, she listened: Pepita’s breathing still had the regular sound of sleep. At the other side of the wall the divan creaked as Arthur stretched himself out again. Having felt ahead of her lightly, to make sure her half was empty, Callie climbed over Pepita and got in. A certain amount of warmth had travelled between the sheets from Pepita’s flank, and in this Callie extended her sword-cold body: she tried to compose her limbs; even they quivered after Arthur’s words in the dark, words to the dark. The loss of her own mysterious expectation, of her love for love, was a small thing beside the war’s total of unlived lives. Suddenly Pepita flung out one hand: its back knocked Callie lightly across the face.

  Pepita had now turned over and lay with her face up. The hand that had struck Callie must have lain over the other, which grasped the pyjama collar. Her eyes, in the dark, might have been either shut or open, but nothing made her frown more or less steadily: it became certain, after another moment, that Pepita’s act of justice had been unconscious. She still lay, as she had lain, in an avid dream, of which Arthur had been the source, of which Arthur was not the end. With him she looked this way, that way, down the wide, void, pure streets, between statues, pillars and shadows, through archways and colonnades. With him she went up the stairs down which nothing but moon came; with him trod the ermine dust of the endless halls, stood on terraces, mounted the extreme tower, looked down
on the statued squares, the wide, void, pure streets. He was the password, but not the answer: it was to Kôr’s finality that she turned.

  * * *

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  * * *

  A FAMILY MAN

  Late in the afternoon, when she had given him up and had even changed out of her pink dress into her smock and jeans and was working once more at her bench, the doorbell rang. William had come, after all. It was in the nature of their love affair that his visits were fitful: he had a wife and children. To show that she understood the situation, even found the curious satisfaction of reverie in his absences that lately had lasted several weeks, Berenice dawdled yawning to the door. As she slipped off the chain, she called back into the empty flat, ‘It’s all right, Father. I’ll answer it.’

  William had told her to do this because she was a woman living on her own: the call would show strangers that there was a man there to defend her. Berenice’s voice was mocking, for she thought his idea possessive and ridiculous; not only that, she had been brought up by Quakers and thought it wrong to tell or act a lie. Sometimes, when she opened the door to him, she would say, ‘Well! Mr Cork’, to remind him he was a married man. He had the kind of shadowed handsomeness that easily gleams with guilt, and for her this gave their affair its piquancy.

  But now – when she opened the door – no William, and the yawn, its hopes and its irony, died on her mouth. A very large woman, taller than herself, filled the doorway from top to bottom, an enormous blob of pink jersey and green skirt, the jersey low and loose at the neck, a face and body inflated to the point of speechlessness. She even seemed to be asleep with her large blue eyes open.

  ‘Yes?’ said Berenice.

  The woman woke up and looked unbelievingly at Berenice’s feet, which were bare, for she liked to go about barefoot at home, and said, ‘Is this Miss Foster’s place?’