The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

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

  They heard his son howl in the wind. They saw him walking over the hill, holding a dead animal up to the light of the stars. They saw him in the valley shadows as he moved, with the motion of a man cutting wheat, over the brows of the fields. In a sanatorium he coughed his lung into a basin, stirring his fingers delightedly in the blood. What moved with invisible scythe through the valley was a shadow and a handful of shadows cast by the grave sun.

  The brush burned out, and the face of the baby fell away with the smoking leaves.

  It was, they said, on a fine sabbath morning in the middle of the summer that Rhys Rhys fell in love with his daughter. The gorse that morning had burst into flames. Rhys Rhys, in clerical black, had seen the flames shoot up to the sky, and the bush on the edge of the hill burn red as God among the paler burning of the grass. He took his daughter’s hand as she lay in the garden hammock, and told her that he loved her. He told her that she was more beautiful than her dead mother. Her hair smelt of mice, her teeth came over her lip, and the lids of her eyes were red and wet. He saw her beauty come out of her like a stream of sap. The folds of her dress could not hide from him the shabby nakedness of her body. It was not her bone, nor her flesh, nor her hair that he found suddenly beautiful. The poor soil shudders under the sun, he said. He moved his hand up and down her arm. Only the awkward and the ugly, only the barren bring forth fruit. The flesh of her arm was red with the smoothing of his hand. He touched her breast. From the touch of her breast he knew each inch of flesh upon her. Why do you touch me there? she said.

  In the church that morning he spoke of the beauty of the harvest, of the promise of the standing corn and the promise in the sharp edge of the scythe as it brings the corn low and whistles through the air before it cuts into the ripeness. Through the open windows at the end of the aisles, he saw the yellow fields upon the hillside and the smudge of heather on the meadow borders. The world was ripe.

  The world is ripe for the second coming of the son of man, he said aloud.

  But it was not the ripeness of God that glistened from the hill. It was the promise and the ripeness of the flesh, the good flesh, the mean flesh, flesh of his daughter, flesh, flesh, the flesh of the voice of thunder howling before the death of man.

  That night he preached of the sins of the flesh. O God in the image of our flesh, he prayed.

  His daughter sat in the front pew, and stroked her arm. She would have touched her breast where he had touched it, but the eyes of the congregation were upon her.

  Flesh, flesh, flesh, said the vicar.

  His son, scouting in the fields for a mole’s hill or the signs of a red fox, whistling to the birds and patting the calves as they stood at their mother’s sides, came upon a dead rabbit sprawling on a stone. The rabbit’s head was riddled with pellets, the dogs had torn open its belly, and the marks of a ferret’s teeth were upon its throat. He lifted it gently up, tickling it behind the ears. The blood from its head dropped on his hand. Through the rip in the belly, its intestines had dropped out and coiled on the stone. He held the little body close to his jacket, and ran home through the fields, the rabbit dancing against his waistcoat. As he reached the gate of the vicarage, the worshippers dribbled out of church. They shook hands and raised their hats, smiling at the poor boy with his long green hair, his ass’s ears, and death buttoned under his jacket. He was always the poor boy to them.

  Rhys Rhys sat in his study, the stem of his pipe stuck between his flybuttons, the bible unopened upon his knees. The day of God was over, and the sun, like another sabbath, went down behind the hills. He lit the lamp, but his own oil burned brighter. He drew the curtains, shutting out the unwelcome night. But he opened his own heart up, and the bald pulse that beat there was a welcome stranger. He had not felt love like this since the woman who scratched him, seeing the woman witch in his male eyes, had fallen into his arms and kissed him, and whispered Welsh words as he took her. She had been the mother of his daughter and had died in her pains, stealing, when she was dead, the son of his second love, and leaving the greenhaired changeling in its place. Merry with desire, Rhys Rhys cast the Bible on the floor. He reached for another book, and read, in the lamplit darkness, of the old woman who had deceived the devil. The devil is poor flesh, said Rhys Rhys.

  His son came in, bearing the rabbit in his arms. The lank, redcoated boy was a flesh out of the past. The skin of the unburied dead patched to his bones, the smile of the changeling on his mouth, and the hair of the sea rising from his scalp, he stood before Rhys Rhys. A ghost of his mother, he held the rabbit gently to his breast, rocking it to and fro. Cunningly, from under halfclosed lids, he saw his father shrink away from the vision of death. Be off with you, said Rhys Rhys. Who was this green stranger to carry in death and rock it, like a baby under a warm shawl of fur, before him? For a minute the flesh of the world lay still; the old terror set in; the waters of the breast dried up; the nipples grew through the sand. Then he drew his hand over his eyes, and only the rabbit remained, a little sack of flesh, half empty, swaying in the arms of his son. Be off, he said. The boy held the rabbit close, and rocked it, and tickled it again.

  Changeling, said Rhys Rhys. He is mine, said the boy, I’ll peel him and keep the skull. His room in the attic was crowded with skulls and dried pelts, and little bones in bottles.

  Give it to me.

  He is mine.

  Rhys Rhys tore the rabbit away, and stuffed it deep in the pockets of his smoking coat. When his daughter came in, dressed and ready for bed, with a candle in her hand, Rhys Rhys had death in his pocket.

  She was timid, for his touch still ached on her arm and breast but she bent unblushing over him. Saying goodnight, she kissed him, and he blew her candle out. She was smiling as he lowered the wick of the lamp.

  Step out of your shift, said he. Shiftless, she stepped towards his arms.

  I want the little skull, said a voice in the dark.

  From his room at the top of the house, through the webs on the windows, and over the furs and the bottles, the boy saw a mile of green hill running away into the darkness of the first dawn. Summer storm in the heat of the rain, flooring the grassy mile, had left some new morning brightness, out of the dead night, in each reaching root.

  Death took hold of his sister’s legs as she walked through the calf-deep heather up the hill. He saw the high grass at her thighs. And the blades of the upgrowing wind, out of the four windsmells of the manuring dead, might drive through the soles of her feet, up the veins of the legs and stomach, into her womb and her pulsing heart. He watched her climb. She stood, gasping for breath, on a hill of the wider hill, tapping the wall of her bladder, fondling her matted chest (for the hair grew on her as on a grown man), feeling the heart in her wrist, loving her coveted thinness. She was to him as ugly as the sowfaced woman of Llareggub who had taught him the terrors of the flesh. He remembered the advances of that unlovely woman. She blew out his candle as he stepped towards her on the night the great hail had fallen and he had hidden in her rotting house from the cruelty of the weather. Now half a mile off his sister stood in the morning, and the vermin of the hill might spring upon her as she stood, uncaring, rounding the angles of her ugliness. He smiled at the thought of the devouring rats, and looked around the room for a bottle to hold her heart. Her skull, fixed by a socket to the nail above his bed, would be a smiling welcome to the first pains of waking.

  But he saw Rhys Rhys stride up the hill, and the bowl of his sister’s head, fixed invisibly above his sheets, crumbled away. Standing straight by the side of a dewy tree, his sister beckoned. Up went Rhys Rhys through the calf-deep heather, the death in the grass, over the boulders and up through the reaching ferns, to where she stood. He took her hand. The two shadows linked hands, and climbed together to the top of the hill. The boy saw them go, and turned his face to the wall as they vanished, in one dull shadow, over the edge, and down to the dingle at the west foot of the lovers’ alley.

  Later, he remembered the rabbit. He ran downstai
rs and found it in the pocket of the smoking coat. He held death against him, tasting a cough of blood upon his tongue as he climbed, contented, back to the bright bottles and the wall of heads.

  In the first dew of light he saw his father clamber for her white hand. She who was his sister walked with a swollen belly over the hill. She touched him between the legs, and he sighed and sprang at her. But the nerves of her face mixed with the quiver in his thighs, and she shot from him. Rhys Rhys, over the bouldered rim, led her to terror. He sighed and sprang at her. She mixed with him in the fourth and the fifth terrors of the flesh. Said Rhys Rhys, Your mother’s eyes. It was not her eyes that saw him proud before her, nor the eyes in her thumb. The lashes of her fingers lifted. He saw the ball under the nail.

  It was, they said, on a fine sabbath morning in the early spring that she bore him a male child. Brought to bed of her father, she screamed for an anaesthetic as the knocking head burst through. In her gown of blood she slept until twilight, and a star burst bloody through each ear. With a scissors and rag, Rhys Rhys attended her, and, gazing on the shrivelled features and the hands like the hands of a mole, he gently took the child away, and his daughter’s breast cried out and ran into the mouth of the surrounding shadows. The shadow pouted for the milk and the binding cottons. The child spat in his arms, the noise of the running air was blind in its ears, and the deaf light died from its eyes.

  Rhys Rhys, with the dead child held against him, stepped into the night, hearing the mother moan in her sleep and the deadly shadow, filled sick with milk, flowing around the house. He turned his face towards the hills. A shadow walked close to him and, silent in the shadow of a full tree, the changeling waited. He made an image for the moon, and the flesh of the moon fell away, leaving a star-eyed skull. Then with a smile he ran back over the lawns and into the crying house. Halfway up the stairs, he heard his sister die. Rhys Rhys climbed on.

  On the top of the hill he laid the baby down, and propped it against the heather. Death propped the dark flowers. The baby stiffened in the rigor of the moon. Poor flesh, said Rhys Rhys as he pulled at the dead heather and furze. Poor angel, he said to the listening mouth of the baby. The fruit of the flesh falls with the worm from the tree. Conceiving the worm, the bark crumbles. There lay the poor star of flesh that had dropped, like the bead of a woman’s milk, through the nipples of a wormy tree.

  He stacked the torn heathers in a circle. On the head of the purple stack, he piled the dead grass. A stack of death, the heather grew as tall as he, and loomed at last over his windy hair.

  Behind a boulder moved the accompanying shadow, and the shadow of the boy was printed under the fiery flank of a tree. The shadow marked the boy, and the boy marked the bones of the naked baby under their chilly cover, and how the grass scraped on the bald skull, and where his father picked out a path in the cancerous growths of the silent circle. He saw Rhys Rhys pick up the baby and place it on the top of the stack, saw the head of a burning match, and heard the crackle of the bush, breaking like a baby’s arm.

  The stack burst into flame. Rhys Rhys, before the red eye of the creeping fire, stretched out his arms and beckoned the shadow from the stones. Surrounded by shadows, he prayed before the flaming stack, and the sparks of the heather blew past his smile. Burn, child, poor flesh, mean flesh, flesh, flesh, sick sorry flesh, flesh of the foul womb, burn back to dust, he prayed.

  And the baby caught fire. The flames curled round its mouth and blew upon the shrinking gums. Flames round its red cord lapped its little belly till the raw flesh fell upon the heather.

  A flame touched its tongue. Eeeeeh, cried the burning baby, and the illuminated hill replied.

  * * *

  GRAHAM GREENE

  * * *

  THE INVISIBLE JAPANESE GENTLEMEN

  There were eight Japanese gentlemen having a fish dinner at Bentley’s. They spoke to each other rarely in their incomprehensible tongue, but always with a courteous smile and often with a small bow. All but one of them wore glasses. Sometimes the pretty girl who sat in the window beyond gave them a passing glance, but her own problem seemed too serious for her to pay real attention to anyone in the world except herself and her companion.

  She had thin blonde hair and her face was pretty and petite in a Regency way, oval like a miniature, though she had a harsh way of speaking – perhaps the accent of the school, Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies’ College, which she had not long ago left. She wore a man’s signet-ring on her engagement finger, and as I sat down at my table, with the Japanese gentlemen between us, she said, ‘So you see we could marry next week.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Her companion appeared a little distraught. He refilled their glasses with Chablis and said, ‘Of course, but Mother…’ I missed some of the conversation then, because the eldest Japanese gentleman leant across the table, with a smile and a little bow, and uttered a whole paragraph like the mutter from an aviary, while everyone bent towards him and smiled and listened, and I couldn’t help attending to him myself.

  The girl’s fiancé resembled her physically. I could see them as two miniatures hanging side by side on white wood panels. He should have been a young officer in Nelson’s navy in the days when a certain weakness and sensitivity were no bar to promotion.

  She said, ‘They are giving me an advance of five hundred pounds, and they’ve sold the paperback rights already.’ The hard commercial declaration came as a shock to me; it was a shock too that she was one of my own profession. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. She deserved better of life.

  He said, ‘But my uncle…’

  ‘You know you don’t get on with him. This way we shall be quite independent.’

  ‘You will be independent,’ he said grudgingly.

  ‘The wine-trade wouldn’t really suit you, would it? I spoke to my publisher about you and there’s a very good chance… if you began with some reading…’

  ‘But I don’t know a thing about books.’

  ‘I would help you at the start.’

  ‘My mother says that writing is a good crutch…’

  ‘Five hundred pounds and half the paperback rights is a pretty solid crutch,’ she said.

  ‘This Chablis is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘I daresay.’

  I began to change my opinion of him – he had not the Nelson touch. He was doomed to defeat. She came alongside and raked him fore and aft. ‘Do you know what Mr Dwight said?’

  ‘Who’s Dwight?’

  ‘Darling, you don’t listen, do you? My publisher. He said he hadn’t read a first novel in the last ten years which showed such powers of observation.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said sadly, ‘wonderful.’

  ‘Only he wants me to change the title.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He doesn’t like The Ever-Rolling Stream. He wants to call it The Chelsea Set.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I agreed. I do think that with a first novel one should try to keep one’s publisher happy. Especially when, really, he’s going to pay for our marriage, isn’t he?’

  ‘I see what you mean.’ Absent-mindedly he stirred his Chablis with a fork – perhaps before the engagement he had always bought champagne. The Japanese gentlemen had finished their fish and with very little English but with elaborate courtesy they were ordering from the middle-aged waitress a fresh fruit salad. The girl looked at them, and then she looked at me, but I think she saw only the future. I wanted very much to warn her against any future based on a first novel called The Chelsea Set. I was on the side of his mother. It was a humiliating thought, but I was probably about her mother’s age.

  I wanted to say to her, Are you certain your publisher is telling you the truth? Publishers are human. They may sometimes exaggerate the virtues of the young and the pretty. Will The Chelsea Set be read in five years? Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily e
ffort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your forties, by performance and not by promise.

  ‘My next novel is going to be about St Tropez.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d ever been there.’

  ‘I haven’t. A fresh eye’s terribly important. I thought we might settle down there for six months.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be much left of the advance by that time.’

  ‘The advance is only an advance. I get fifteen per cent after five thousand copies and twenty per cent after ten. And of course another advance will be due, darling, when the next book’s finished. A bigger one if The Chelsea Set sells well.’

  ‘Suppose it doesn’t.’

  ‘Mr Dwight says it will. He ought to know.’

  ‘My uncle would start me at twelve hundred.’

  ‘But, darling, how could you come then to St Tropez?’

  ‘Perhaps we’d do better to marry when you come back.’

  She said harshly, ‘I mightn’t come back if The Chelsea Set sells enough.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She looked at me and the party of Japanese gentlemen. She finished her wine. She said, ‘Is this a quarrel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve got the title for the next book – The Azure Blue.’

  ‘I thought azure was blue.’

  She looked at him with disappointment. ‘You don’t really want to be married to a novelist, do you?’

  ‘You aren’t one yet.’

  ‘I was born one – Mr Dwight says. My powers of observation…’

  ‘Yes. You told me that, but, dear, couldn’t you observe a bit nearer home? Here in London.’