The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

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

  She lay on her back on the green satin cover, but her legs were chilly. She got up, found a blanket folded in the bottom of the chest of drawers, and carefully covered her legs with it. She was quite content lying there, listening to the faint soft hiss of the gas that poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drifted off into the dark river.

  * * *

  MURIEL SPARK

  * * *

  THE HOUSE OF THE FAMOUS POET

  In the summer of 1944, when it was nothing for trains from the provinces to be five or six hours late, I travelled to London on the night train from Edinburgh, which, at York, was already three hours late. There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason.

  I have the impression, looking back on it, of a row of people opposite me, dozing untidily with heads askew, and, as it often seems when we look at sleeping strangers, their features had assumed extra emphasis and individuality, sometimes disturbing to watch. It was as if they had rendered up their daytime talent for obliterating the outward traces of themselves in exchange for mental obliteration. In this way they resembled a twelfth-century fresco; there was a look of medieval unselfconsciousness about these people, all except one.

  This was a private soldier who was awake to a greater degree than most people are when they are not sleeping. He was smoking cigarettes one after the other with long, calm puffs. I thought he looked excessively evil – an atavistic type. His forehead must have been less than two inches high above dark, thick eyebrows, which met. His jaw was not large, but it was apelike; so was his small nose and so were his deep, close-set eyes. I thought there must have been some consanguinity in the parents. He was quite a throw-back.

  As it turned out, he was extremely gentle and kind. When I ran out of cigarettes, he fished about in his haversack and produced a packet for me and one for a girl sitting next to me. We both tried, with a flutter of small change, to pay him. Nothing would please him at all but that we should accept his cigarettes, whereupon he returned to his silent, reflective smoking.

  I felt a sort of pity for him then, rather as we feel towards animals we know to be harmless, such as monkeys. But I realized that, like the pity we expend on monkeys merely because they are not human beings, this pity was not needed.

  Receiving the cigarettes gave the girl and myself common ground, and we conversed quietly for the rest of the journey. She told me she had a job in London as a domestic helper and nursemaid. She looked as if she had come from a country district – her very blonde hair, red face and large bones gave the impression of power, as if she was used to carrying heavy things, perhaps great scuttles of coal, or two children at a time. But what made me curious about her was her voice, which was cultivated, melodious and restrained.

  Towards the end of the journey, when the people were beginning to jerk themselves straight and the rushing to and fro in the corridor had started, this girl, Elise, asked me to come with her to the house where she worked. The master, who was something in a university, was away with his wife and family.

  I agreed to this, because at that time I was in the way of thinking that the discovery of an educated servant girl was valuable and something to be gone deeper into. It had the element of experience – perhaps, even of truth – and I believed, in those days, that truth is stranger than fiction. Besides, I wanted to spend that Sunday in London. I was due back next day at my job in a branch of the civil service, which had been evacuated to the country and for a reason that is another story, I didn’t want to return too soon. I had some telephoning to do, I wanted to wash and change. I wanted to know more about the girl. So I thanked Elise and accepted her invitation.

  I regretted it as soon as we got out of the train at King’s Cross, some minutes after ten. Standing up tall on the platform, Elise looked unbearably tired, as if not only the last night’s journey but every fragment of her unknown life was suddenly heaping up on top of her. The power I had noticed in the train was no longer there. As she called, in her beautiful voice, for a porter, I saw that on the side of her head that had been away from me in the train, her hair was parted in a dark streak, which, by contrast with the yellow, looked navy blue. I had thought, when I first saw her, that possibly her hair was bleached, but now, seeing it so badly done, seeing this navy blue parting pointing like an arrow to the weighted weariness of her face, I, too, got the sensation of great tiredness. And it was not only the strain of the journey that I felt, but the foreknowledge of boredom that comes upon us unaccountably at the beginning of a quest, and that checks, perhaps mercifully, our curiosity.

  And, as it happened, there really wasn’t much to learn about Elise. The explanation of her that I had been prompted to seek, I got in the taxi between King’s Cross and the house at Swiss Cottage. She came of a good family, who thought her a pity, and she them. Having no training for anything else, she had taken a domestic job on leaving home. She was engaged to an Australian soldier billeted also at Swiss Cottage.

  Perhaps it was the anticipation of a day’s boredom, maybe it was the effect of no sleep or the fact that the V-I sirens were sounding, but I felt some sourness when I saw the house. The garden was growing all over the place. Elise opened the front door, and we entered a darkish room almost wholly taken up with a long, plain wooden worktable. On this, were a half-empty marmalade jar, a pile of papers, and a dried-up ink bottle. There was a steel-canopied bed, known as a Morrison shelter, in one corner and some photographs on the mantelpiece, one of a schoolboy wearing glasses. Everything was tainted with Elise’s weariness and my own distaste. But Elise didn’t seem to be aware of the exhaustion so plainly revealed on her face. She did not even bother to take her coat off, and as it was too tight for her I wondered how she could move about so quickly with this restriction added to the weight of her tiredness. But, with her coat still buttoned tight Elise phoned her boy-friend and made breakfast, while I washed in a dim, blue, cracked bathroom upstairs.

  When I found that she had opened my hold-all without asking me and had taken out my rations, I was a little pleased. It seemed a friendly action, with some measure of reality about it, and I felt better. But I was still irritated by the house. I felt there was no justification for the positive lack of consequence which was lying about here and there. I asked no questions about the owner who was something in a university, for fear of getting the answer I expected – that he was away visiting his grandchildren, at some family gathering in the home counties. The owners of the house had no reality for me, and I looked upon the place as belonging to, and permeated with, Elise.

  I went with her to a nearby public house, where she met her boy-friend and one or two other Australian soldiers. They had with them a thin Cockney girl with bad teeth. Elise was very happy, and insisted in her lovely voice that they should all come along to a party at the house that evening. In a fine aristocratic tone, she demanded that each should bring a bottle of beer.

  During the afternoon Elise said she was going to have a bath, and she showed me a room where I could use the telephone and sleep if I wanted. This was a large, light room with several windows, much more orderly than the rest of the house, and lined with books. There was only one unusual thing about it: beside one of the windows was a bed, but this bed was only a fairly thick mattress made up neatly on the floor. It was obviously a bed on the floor with some purpose, and again I was angered to think of the futile crankiness of the elderly professor who had thought of it.

  I did my telephoning, and decided to rest. But first I wanted to find something to read. The books puzzled me. None of them seemed to be automatically part of a scholar’s library. An inscription in one book was signed by the author, a well-known novelist. I found another inscribed copy, and this had the name of the recipient. On a sudden idea, I went to the desk, where while I had been telephoning I had noticed a pile of unopened letters. For the first time, I looked at the name of the owner of the house.

  I ran to the bathroom and shouted through t
he door to Elise, ‘Is this the house of the famous poet?’

  ‘Yes,’ she called. ‘I told you.’

  She had told me nothing of the kind. I felt I had no right at all to be there, for it wasn’t, now, the house of Elise acting by proxy for some unknown couple. It was the house of a famous modern poet. The thought that at any moment he and his family might walk in and find me there terrified me. I insisted that Elise should open the bathroom door and tell me to my face that there was no possible chance of their returning for many days to come.

  Then I began to think about the house itself, which Elise was no longer accountable for. Its new definition, as the house of a poet whose work I knew well, many of whose poems I knew by heart, gave it altogether a new appearance.

  To confirm this, I went outside and stood exactly where I had been when I first saw the garden from the door of the taxi. I wanted to get my first impression for a second time.

  And this time I saw an absolute purpose in the overgrown garden, which, since then, I have come to believe existed in the eye of the beholder. But, at the time, the room we had first entered, and which had riled me, now began to give back a meaning, and whatever was, was right. The caked-up bottle of ink, which Elise had put on the mantelpiece, I replaced on the table to make sure. I saw a photograph I hadn’t noticed before, and I recognized the famous poet.

  It was the same with the upstairs room where Elise had put me, and I handled the books again, not so much with the sense that they belonged to the famous poet but with some curiosity about how they had been made. The sort of question that occurred to me was where the paper had come from and from what sort of vegetation was manufactured the black print, and these things have not troubled me since.

  The Australians and the Cockney girl came around about seven. I had planned to catch an eight-thirty train to the country, but when I telephoned to confirm the time I found there were no Sunday trains running. Elise, in her friendly and exhausted way, begged me to stay without attempting to be too serious about it. The sirens were starting up again. I asked Elise once more to repeat that the poet and his family could by no means return that night. But I asked this question more abstractedly than before, as I was thinking of the sirens and of the exact proportions of the noise they made. I wondered, as well, what sinister genius of the Home Office could have invented so ominous a wail, and why. And I was thinking of the word ‘siren’. The sound then became comical, for I imagined some maniac sea nymph from centuries past belching into the year 1944. Actually, the sirens frightened me.

  Most of all, I wondered about Elise’s party. Everyone roamed about the place as if it were nobody’s house in particular, with Elise the best-behaved of the lot. The Cockney girl sat on the long table and gave of her best to the skies every time a bomb exploded. I had the feeling that the house had been requisitioned for an evening by the military. It was so hugely and everywhere occupied that it became not the house I had first entered, nor the house of the famous poet, but a third house – the one I had vaguely prefigured when I stood, bored, on the platform at King’s Cross station. I saw a great amount of tiredness among these people, and heard, from the loud noise they made, that they were all lacking sleep. When the beer was finished and they were gone, some to their billets, some to pubs, and the Cockney girl to her Underground shelter where she had slept for weeks past, I asked Elise, ‘Don’t you feel tired?’

  ‘No,’ she said with agonizing weariness, ‘I never feel tired.’

  I fell asleep myself, as soon as I had got into the bed on the floor in the upstairs room, and overslept until Elise woke me at eight. I had wanted to get up early to catch a nine o’clock train, so I hadn’t much time to speak to her. I did notice, though, that she had lost some of her tired look.

  I was pushing my things into my hold-all while Elise went up the street to catch a taxi when I heard someone coming upstairs. I thought it was Elise come back, and I looked out of the open door. I saw a man in uniform carrying an enormous parcel in both hands. He looked down as he climbed, and had a cigarette in his mouth.

  ‘Do you want Elise?’ I called, thinking it was one of her friends.

  He looked up, and I recognized the soldier, the throw-back, who had given us cigarettes in the train.

  ‘Well, anyone will do,’ he said. ‘The thing is, I’ve got to get back to camp and I’m stuck for the fare – eight and six.’

  I told him I could manage it, and was finding the money when he said, putting his parcel on the floor, ‘I don’t want to borrow it. I wouldn’t think of borrowing it. I’ve got something for sale.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘A funeral,’ said the soldier. ‘I’ve got it here.’

  This alarmed me, and I went to the window. No hearse, no coffin stood below. I saw only the avenue of trees.

  The soldier smiled. ‘It’s an abstract funeral,’ he explained, opening the parcel.

  He took it out and I examined it carefully, greatly comforted. It was very much the sort of thing I had wanted – rather more purple in parts than I would have liked, for I was not in favour of this colour of mourning. Still, I thought I could tone it down a bit.

  Delighted with the bargain, I handed over the eight shillings and sixpence. There was a great deal of this abstract funeral. Hastily, I packed some of it into the holdall. Some I stuffed in my pockets, and there was still some left over. Elise had returned with a cab and I hadn’t much time. So I ran for it, out of the door and out of the gate of the house of the famous poet, with the rest of my funeral trailing behind me.

  You will complain that I am withholding evidence. Indeed, you may wonder if there is any evidence at all. ‘An abstract funeral,’ you will say, ‘is neither here nor there. It is only a notion. You cannot pack a notion into your bag. You cannot see the colour of a notion.’

  You will insinuate that what I have just told you is pure fiction.

  Hear me to the end.

  I caught the train. Imagine my surprise when I found, sitting opposite me, my friend the soldier, of whose existence you are so sceptical.

  ‘As a matter of interest,’ I said, ‘how would you describe all this funeral you sold me?’

  ‘Describe it?’ he said. ‘Nobody describes an abstract funeral. You just conceive it.’

  ‘There is much in what you say,’ I replied. ‘Still, describe it I must, because it is not every day one comes by an abstract funeral.’

  ‘I am glad you appreciate that,’ said the soldier.

  ‘And after the war,’ I continued, ‘when I am no longer a civil servant, I hope, in a few deftly turned phrases, to write of my experiences at the house of the famous poet, which has culminated like this. But of course,’ I added, ‘I will need to say what it looks like.’

  The soldier did not reply.

  ‘If it were an okapi or a sea-cow,’ I said, ‘I would have to say what it looked like. No one would believe me otherwise.’

  ‘Do you want your money back?’ asked the soldier. ‘Because if so, you can’t have it. I spent it on my ticket.’

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ I hastened to say. ‘The funeral is a delightful abstraction. Only, I wish to put it down in writing.’

  I felt a great pity for the soldier on seeing his worried look. The apelike head seemed the saddest thing in the world.

  ‘I make them by hand,’ he said, ‘these abstract funerals.’

  A siren sounded somewhere, far away.

  ‘Elise bought one of them last month. She hadn’t any complaints. I change at the next stop,’ he said, getting down his kit from the rack. ‘And what’s more,’ he said, ‘your famous poet bought one.’

  ‘Oh, did he?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘No complaints. It was just what he wanted – the idea of a funeral.’

  The train pulled up. The soldier leaped down and waved. As the train started again, I unpacked my abstract funeral and looked at it for a few moments.

  ‘To hell with the idea,’ I said. ‘It
’s a real funeral I want.’

  ‘All in good time,’ said a voice from the corridor.

  ‘You again,’ I said. It was the soldier.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I got off at the last station. I’m only a notion of myself.’

  ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘would you be offended if I throw all this away?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said the soldier. ‘You can’t offend a notion.’

  ‘I want a real funeral,’ I explained. ‘One of my own.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the soldier.

  ‘And then I’ll be able to write about it and go into all the details,’ I said.

  ‘Your own funeral?’ he said. ‘You want to write it up?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But,’ said he, ‘you’re only human. Nobody reports on their own funeral. It’s got to be abstract.’

  ‘You see my predicament?’ I said.

  ‘I see it,’ he replied. ‘I get off at this stop.’

  This notion of a soldier alighted. Once more the train put on speed. Out of the window I chucked all my eight and sixpence worth of abstract funeral. I watched it fluttering over the fields and around the tops of camouflaged factories with the sun glittering richly upon it, until it was out of sight.

  In the summer of 1944 a great many people were harshly and suddenly killed. The papers reported, in due course, those whose names were known to the public. One of these, the famous poet, had returned unexpectedly to his home at Swiss Cottage a few moments before it was hit direct by a flying bomb. Fortunately, he had left his wife and children in the country.

  When I got to the place where my job was, I had some time to spare before going on duty. I decided to ring Elise and thank her properly, as I had left in such a hurry. But the lines were out of order, and the operator could not find words enough to express her annoyance with me. Behind this overworked, quarrelsome voice from the exchange I heard the high, long hoot which means that the telephone at the other end is not functioning, and the sound made me infinitely depressed and weary; it was more intolerable to me than the sirens, and I replaced the receiver; and, in fact, Elise had already perished under the house of the famous poet.