The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

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

  I’m a financier. I have financial assets, world-wide. I’m in nickel and pig-iron and gold and diamonds. I like the sound of all these words. They have an edge, I think. The glitter of saying them sometimes gives me an erection.

  I’m saying them now in this French restaurant, where the tablecloths and the table-napkins are blue linen, where they serve sea-food on platters of seaweed and crushed ice. It’s noisy at lunch-time. It’s May and the sun shines in London, through the open restaurant windows. Opposite me, the two young Australians blink as they wait (so damned courteous, and she has freckles like a child) for me to stutter out my hard-word list, to manipulate tongue and memory so that the sound inside me forms just behind my lips and explodes with extraordinary force above my oysters: ‘Diamonds!’

  But then I feel a soft, perfumed dabbing at my face. I turn away from the Australians and there she is. My wife. She is smiling as she wipes me. Her gold bracelets rattle. She is smiling at me. Her lips are astonishing, the colour of claret. I’ve been wanting to ask her for some time, ‘Why are your lips this terrible dark colour these days? Is it a lipstick you put on?’

  Still smiling at me, she’s talking to the Australians with her odd accent: ‘He’s able to enjoy the pleasures of life once more, thank God. For a long time afterwards I couldn’t take him out. Terrible. We couldn’t do one single thing, you know. But now – he enjoys his wine again.’

  The dabbing stops. To the nurse I tried to say when I felt a movement begin: ‘Teach me how to wipe my arse. I cannot let my wife do this because she doesn’t love me. If she loved me, she probably wouldn’t mind wiping my arse, and I wouldn’t mind her wiping my arse. But she doesn’t love me.’

  The Australian man is talking now. I let my hand go up and take hold of my big-bowled wine glass into which the waiter has poured the expensive Chablis my wife likes to drink when she eats fish. Slowly, I guide the glass across the deadweight distance between the table and my mouth. I say ‘deadweight’ because the spaces between all my limbs and the surfaces of tangible things have become mighty. To walk is to wade in waist-high water. And to lift this wine glass… ‘Help me,’ I want to say to her, ‘just this once.’ Just this once.

  ‘Heck,’ says the Australian man, ‘we honestly thought he’d made a pretty positive recovery.’ His wife, with blue eyes the colour of the napkins, is watching my struggles with the glass. She licks her fine line of a mouth, sensing I suppose, my longing to taste the wine. The nurse used to stand behind me, guiding the feeding-cup in my hand. I never explained to her that the weight of gravity had mysteriously increased. Yet often, as I drank from the feeding-cup, I used to imagine myself prancing on the moon.

  ‘Oh, this is a very positive recovery,’ says my wife. ‘There’s very little he can’t do now. He enjoys the ballet, you know, and the opera. People at Covent Garden and the better kind of place are very considerate. We don’t go to the cinema because there you have a very inconsiderate type of person. Don’t you agree? So riff-raffy. Don’t you agree?’

  The Australian wife hasn’t listened to a word. The Australian wife puts out a lean freckled arm and I watch it come towards me, astounded as usual these days by the speed with which other people can move parts of their bodies. But the arm, six inches from my hand holding the glass, suddenly stops. ‘Don’t help him!’ snaps my wife. The napkin-blue eyes are lowered. The arm is folded away.

  Heads turn in the restaurant. I suppose her voice has carried its inevitable echo round the room where we sit: ‘Don’t help him! Don’t help him! But now that I have an audience, the glass begins to jolt, the wine splashing up and down the sides of the bowl. I smile. My smile widens as I watch the Chablis begin to slop onto the starched blue cloth. WASTE. She of all people understands the exquisite luxury of waste. Yet she snatches the glass out of my hand and sets it down by her own. She snaps her fingers and a young bean pole of a waiter arrives. He spreads out a fresh blue napkin where I have spilled my wine. My wife smiles her claret smile. She sucks an oyster into her dark mouth.

  The Australian man is, I was told, the manager of the Toomin Valley Nickel Consortium. The wife is, as far as I know, just a wife. I own four-fifths of the Toomin Valley Nickel Consortium. The Australian man is here to discuss expansion, supposedly with me, unaware until he met me this lunch-time that despite the pleasing cadences of the words I’m unable to say Toomin Valley Nickel Consortium. I can say ‘nickel’. My tongue lashes around in my throat to form the click that comes in the middle of the word. Then out it spills: Nickel! In my mind, oddly enough, the word ‘nickel’ is the exact greyish-white colour of an oyster. But ‘consortium’ is too difficult for me. I know my limitations.

  My wife is talking again: ‘I’ve always loved the ballet, you see. This is my only happy memory of Russia – the wonderful classical ballet. A little magic. Don’t you think? I would never want to be without this kind of magic, would you? Do you have the first-rate ballet companies in Australia? You do? Well, that’s good. Giselle, of course. That’s the best one. Don’t you think? The dead girl. Don’t you think? Wonderful.’

  We met on a pavement. I believe it was in the Avenue Matignon, but it could have been the Avenue Montaigne. I often get these muddled. It was in Paris, anyway. Early summer, as it is now. Chestnut candle blooms blown along the gutters. I waited to get into the taxi she was leaving. But I didn’t get into it. I followed her. In a bar, she told me she was very poor; her father drove the taxi I had almost hired. She spoke no English then, only French with a heavy Russian accent. I was just starting to be a financier at that time, but already I was quite rich, rich by her standards – she who had been used to life in post-war Russia. My hotel room was rather grand. She said in her odd French: ‘I’ll fuck for money.’

  I gave her fifty francs. I suppose it wasn’t much, not as much as she’d hoped for, a poor rate of exchange for the white, white body that rode astride me, head thrown back, breasts bouncing. She sat at the dressing-table in the hotel room. She smoked my American cigarettes. More than anything, I wanted to brush her gold hair, brush it smooth and hold it against my face. But I didn’t ask her if I could do this. I believe I was afraid she would say, ‘You can do it for money.’

  The thin waiter is clearing away our oyster platters. I’ve eaten only three of my oysters, yet I let my plate go. She lets it go. She pretends not to notice how slow I’ve been with the oysters. And my glass of wine still stands by hers, untasted. Yet she’s drinking quite fast. I hear her order a second bottle.

  The Australian man says: ‘First rate choice, if I may say so. We like Chably.’

  I raise my left arm and touch her elbow, nodding at the wine. Without looking at me, she puts my glass down in front of me. The Australian wife stares at it. Neither she nor I dare to touch it.

  My wife is explaining to the Australians what they are about to eat, as if they were children: ‘I think you will like the turbot very much. Turbot poché hollandaise. They cook it very well. And the hollandaise sauce – you know this, of course? Very difficult to achieve, the lightness of this sauce. But here they do it very well. And the scallops in saffron. Again, a very light sauce. Excellent texture. Just a little cream added. And fresh scallops, naturally. We never go to any restaurant where the products are frozen. So I think you will like these dishes very much…’

  We have separate rooms. Long before my illness, when I began to look (yet hardly to feel) old, she demanded her privacy. This was how she put it: she wanted to be private. The bedroom we used to share and which is now hers is very large. The walls are silk.

  She said: ‘There’s no sense in being rich and being cooped up together in one room.’

  Obediently, I moved out. She wouldn’t let me have the guest room, which is also big. I have what we call ‘the little room’, which I always used to think of as a child’s room.

  I expect in her ‘privacy’ that she is smiling: ‘The child’s room is completely right for him. He’s a helpless baby.’ Yet she’s not a private person
. She likes to go out four or five nights a week, returning at two or three in the morning, sometimes with friends, and they sit and drink brandy. Sometimes, they play music. Elton John. She has a lover (I don’t know his name) who sends her lilies.

  I’m trying to remember the Toomin Valley. I believe it’s an immense desert of a place, inhabited by no one and nothing except the mining machinery and the Nickel Consortium employees, whose clusters of houses I ordered to be whitewashed to hide the cheap grey building blocks. The windows of the houses are small, to keep out the sun. In the back yards are spindly eucalyptus trees, blown by the scorching winds. I want to ask the Australian wife, did you have freckles before you went to live in the Toomin Valley, and does some wandering prima ballerina dance Giselle on the gritty escarpment above the mine?

  My scallops arrive, saffron yellow and orange in the blue and white dish – the colours of a childhood summer. The flesh of a scallop is firm yet soft, the texture of a woman’s thigh (when she is young, of course, before the skin hardens and the flesh bags out). A forkful of scallop is immeasurably easier to lift than the glass of wine, and the Australian wife (why don’t I know either of their names?) smiles at me approvingly as I lift the succulent parcel of food to my mouth and chew it without dribbling. My wife, too, is watching, ready with the little scented handkerchief, yet talking as she eats, talking of Australia as the second bottle of Chablis arrives and she tastes it hurriedly with a curt nod to the thin waiter. I exist only in the corner of her eye, at its inmost edge, where the vulnerable triangle of red flesh is startling.

  ‘Of course, I’ve often said to Hubert’ (she pronounces my name ‘Eieu-bert’, trying and failing with what she recognizes as the upper class h), ‘that it’s very unfair to expect people like you to live in some out-of-the-way place. I was brought up in a village, you see, and I know that an out-of-the-way village is so dead. No culture. The same in Toomin, no? Absolutely no culture at all. Everybody dead.’

  The Australian wife looks – seemingly for the first time – straight at my wife. ‘We’re outdoor people.’

  I remember now. A river used to flow through the Toomin Valley. Torrential in the rainy season, they said. It dried up in the early ’forties. One or two sparse willows remain, grey testimony to the long-ago existence of water-rich soil. I imagine the young Australian couple, brown as chestnuts, swimming in the Toomin River, resting on its gentle banks with their fingers touching, a little loving nest of bone. There is no river. Yet when they look at each other – almost furtively under my vacant gaze – I recognize the look. The look says: ‘These moments with strangers are nothing. Into our private moments together – only there – is crammed all that we ask of life.’

  ‘Yes, we’re outdoor folk.’ The Australian man is smiling. ‘You can play tennis most of the year round at Toomin. I’m president of the tennis club. And we have our own pool now.’

  I don’t remember these things: tennis-courts and swimming-pools.

  ‘Well, of course, you have the climate for these things.’ My wife is signalling our waiter to bring her Perrier water. ‘And it’s something to do, isn’t it? Perhaps when the new expansions of the company are made, a concert hall could be built for you, or a theatre.’

  ‘A theatre!’ The Australian wife’s mouth opens to reveal perfect, freshly-peeled teeth and a laugh escapes. She blushes.

  My wife’s dark lips are puckered into a sneer.

  But the Australian man is laughing too – a rich laugh you might easily remember on the other side of the world – and slapping his thigh. ‘A theatre! What about that, ay?’

  She wanted, she said, as she smoked my American cigarettes, to see Don Giovanni. Since leaving Russia with her French mother and her Russian father, no one had ever taken her to the opera. She had seen the posters advertising Don Giovanni and had asked her father to buy her a ticket.

  He had shouted at her: ‘Remember whose child you are! Do you imagine taxi drivers can afford seats at the Opéra?’

  ‘Take me to see Don Giovanni,’ she said to me, ‘and I will fuck for nothing.’

  I’ve never really appreciated the opera. The Don was fat. It was difficult to imagine so many women wanting to lie with this fat man. Yet afterwards, she leant over to me and put her head on my shoulder and wept. Nothing, she told me, had ever moved her so much – nothing in her life had ever touched the core of her being – as this had done, this production of Don Giovanni.

  ‘If only,’ she said, ‘I had money as you have money, then I would go to hear music all the time and see the classical ballet and learn from these what is life.’

  The scallops are good. She never learned what is life. I feel emboldened by the food. I put my hand to my glass, heavier than ever now because the waiter has filled it up. The sun shines on my wine and on my hand, blotched (splattered, it seems) with the oddly repulsive stains of old age. For a second, I see my hand and the wine glass as a still-life. But then I lift the glass. The Australian wife lowers her eyes. My wife, for a moment, is silent. I drink. I smile at the Australian wife because I know she wants to applaud.

  I’m talking. The words are like stones weighing down my lower jaw. Nickel. I’m trying to tell the Australian man that I dream about the nickel mine. In my dreams, the Australian miners drag wooden carts loaded with threepenny bits. I run my hands through the coins as though through a sack of wheat, and the touch of them is pleasurable and perfect. I also want to say to the Australian man: ‘I hope you’re happy in your work. When I was in control, I visited all my mines and all my subsidiaries at least once a year. Even in South Africa, I made sure a living wage was paid. I said to the men underground, “I hope you’re happy in your work.” ’

  But now I have a manager, a head-manager to manage all the other managers, including this one from the Toomin Valley. I am trundled out in my chair to meet them when they come here to discuss redundancy or expansion. My wife and I give them lunch in a restaurant. They remind me that I still have an empire to rule, if I were capable, if indeed my life had been different since the night of Don Giovanni.

  When I stopped paying her to sleep with me, her father came to see me. He held his cap in his hands. ‘We’re hoping for a marriage,’ he said. And what more could I have given – what less – to the body I had begun to need? The white and the gold of her, I thought, will ornament my life.

  Yet now I never touch her. The white and the gold of her lies only in the lilies they send, the unknown lovers she finds in the night, while I lie in the child’s room and dream of the nickel mines. My heart is scorched dry, like the dry hills of the Toomin Valley. I am punished for my need of her while her life stalks my silence; the white of her, the gold of her, the white of Dior, the gold of Cartier. Why did she never love me? In my dreams, too, the answer comes from deep underground: it’s the hardness of my words.

  * * *

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  * * *

  THE PROPHET’S HAIR

  Early in 19—, when Srinagar was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men’s bones as if they were glass, a young man upon whose cold-pinked skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth was to be seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the services of a dependably professional thief. The young man’s name was Atta, and the rogues in that part of town directed him gleefully into ever-darker and less public alleys, until in a yard wet with the blood of a slaughtered chicken he was set upon by two men whose faces he never saw, robbed of the substantial bank-roll which he had insanely brought on his solitary excursion, and beaten within an inch of his life.

  Night fell. His body was carried by anonymous hands to the edge of the lake, whence it was transported by shikara across the water and deposited, torn and bleeding, on the deserted embankment of the canal which led to the gardens of Shalimar. At dawn the n
ext morning a flower-vendor was rowing his boat through water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey when he saw the prone form of young Atta, who was just beginning to stir and moan, and on whose now deathly pale skin the sheen of wealth could still be made out dimly beneath an actual layer of frost. The flower-vendor moored his craft and by stooping over the mouth of the injured man was able to learn the poor fellow’s address, which was mumbled through lips which could scarcely move; whereupon, hoping for a large tip, the hawker rowed Atta home to a large house on the shores of the lake, where a painfully beautiful girl and her equally handsome mother, neither of whom, it was clear from their eyes, had slept a wink from worrying, screamed at the sight of their Atta – who was the elder brother of the beautiful girl – lying motionless amid the funereally stunted winter blooms of the hopeful florist. The flower-vendor was indeed paid off handsomely, not least to ensure his silence, and plays no further part in our story. Atta himself, suffering terribly from exposure as well as a broken skull, entered a coma which caused the city’s finest doctors to shrug helplessly. It was therefore all the more remarkable that on the very same evening the most wretched and disreputable part of the city received a second unexpected visitor. This was Huma, the sister of the unfortunate young man, and her question was the same as her brother’s, and asked in the same low, grave tones: ‘Where may I hire a thief?’

  The story of the rich idiot who had come looking for a burglar was already common knowledge in those insalubrious gullies, but this time the girl added: ‘I should say that I am carrying no money, nor am I wearing any jewels; my father has disowned me and will pay no ransom if I am kidnapped; and a letter has been lodged with the Commissioner of Police, my uncle, to be opened in the event of my not being safe at home by morning. In that letter he will find full details of my journey here, and he will move Heaven and Earth to punish my assailants.’ Her extraordinary beauty, which was visible even through the enormous welts and bruises disfiguring her arms and forehead, coupled with the oddity of her inquiries, had attracted a sizable group of curious onlookers, and because her little speech seemed to them to cover just about everything, no one attempted to injure her in any way, although there were some raucous comments to the effect that it was pretty peculiar for someone who was trying to hire a crook to invoke the protection of a high-up policeman uncle. She was directed into ever-darker and less public alleys until finally in a gully as dark as ink an old woman with eyes which stared so piercingly that Huma instantly understood she was blind motioned her through a doorway from which darkness seemed to be pouring like smoke. Clenching her fists, angrily ordering her heart to behave normally, the girl followed the old woman into the gloom-wrapped house.