by David Miller
The doctor did not need the encouragement. He looked like a small boy sucking a man’s pipe.
“I waited until the whole school was at study and then I crept out into the empty grounds. At that hour the school, the grounds, everywhere, was as silent as the grave. Games over. The priests at their afternoon tea. Their charges safely under control. I don’t know how I managed to get over that high wall, but when I fell scrambling down on the other side, there he was. ‘You’re bloody late,’ he said crossly. ‘How did you get out of prep? What excuse did you give?’ When I told him he flew into a rage. ‘You little fool!’ he growled. ‘You’ve balloxed it all up. They’ll know you dodged. They’ll give you at least ten on the backside for this.’ He was carrying a cane. Seniors at Saint Bernard’s did carry walking sticks. I’d risked so much for him, and now he was so angry with me that I burst into tears. He put his arms around me – I thought, to comfort me – but after that all I remember from that side of the wall was him pulling down my short pants, holding me tight, I felt something hard, like his cane, and the next thing I knew I was wet. I thought I was bleeding. I thought he was gone mad. When I smelled whiskey I thought, ‘He is trying to kill me.’ ‘Now run,’ he ordered me, ‘and get back to prep as fast as you can.’”
Morgan covered his eyes with his hand.
“He shoved me up to the top of the wall. As I peered around I heard his footsteps running away. I fell down into the shrubs on the other side and I immediately began to vomit and vomit. There was a path beside the shrubs. As I lay there puking I saw a black-soutaned priest approaching slowly along the path. He was an old, old priest named Constable. I did not stir. Now, I felt, I’m for it. This is the end. I am certain he saw me but he passed by as if he had not seen me. I got back to the study hall, walked up to the Prefect’s desk and told him I was late because I had been sick. I must have looked it because he at once sent me to the matron in the infirmary. She took my temperature and put me to bed. It was summer. I was the only inmate of the ward. One of those evenings of prolonged daylight.”
“You poor little bugger!” Morgan groaned in sympathy.
“A detail comes back to me. It was the privilege of seniors attending the captain’s dinner to send down gifts to the juniors’ table – sweets, fruit, a cake, for a younger brother or some special protégé. Bruiser ordered a whole white blancmange with a rosy cherry on top of it to be sent to me. He did not know I was not in the dining hall so the blacmange was brought up to me in the infirmary. I vomited again when I saw it. The matron, with my more than ready permission, took some of it for herself and sent the rest back to the juniors’ table, ‘with Master Breen’s compliments.’ I am sure it was gobbled greedily. In the morning the doctor saw me and had me sent home to Ireland immediately.”
“Passing the buck,” said Morgan sourly, and they both looked at a coal that tinkled from the fire into the fender.
The doctor peered quizzically at the hissing coal.
“Well?” he slurred around his pipestem. “There is your lovely idyll.”
Morgan did not lift his eyes from the fire. Under a downdraft from the chimney a few specks of grey ashes moved clockwise on the worn hearth. He heard a car hissing past the house on the wet macadam. His eyebrows had gone up over his spectacles in two Gothic arches.
“I am afraid,” he said at last, “it is no go. Not even a Maupassant could have made a story out of it. And Chekhov wouldn’t have wanted to try. Unless the two boys lived on, and on, and met years afterwards in Moscow or Yalta or somewhere, each with a wife and a squad of kids, and talked of everything except their schooldays. You are sure you never did hear of him, or from him, again?”
“Never! Apart from the letter he sent with the blancmange and the cherry.”
Morgan at once leaped alive.
“A letter? Now we are on to something! What did he say to you in it? Recite every word of it to me! Every syllable. I’m sure you have not forgotten one word of it. No!” he cried excitedly. “You have kept it. Hidden away somewhere all these years. Friendship surviving everything. Fond memories of …”
The doctor sniffed.
“I tore it into bits unread and flushed it down the W.C.”
“Oh, God blast you, Frank!” Morgan roared. “That was the climax of the whole thing. The last testament. The final revelation. The summing up. The document humain. And you ‘just tore it up!’ Let’s reconstruct it. ‘Dearest Rosy, As long as I live I will never forget your innocence, your sweetness, your …’”
“My dear boy!” the doctor protested mildly. “I am sure he wrote nothing of the sort. He was much too cautious, and even the captain was not immune from censorship. Besides, sitting in public glory at the head of the table? It was probably a place-card with something on the lines of, ‘All my sympathy, sorry, better luck next term.’ A few words, discreet, that I could translate any way I liked.”
Morgan raised two despairing arms.
“If that was all the damned fellow could say to you after that appalling experience, he was a character of no human significance whatever, a shallow creature, a mere agent, a catalyst, a cad. The story becomes your story.”
“I must admit I have always looked on it in that way. After all it did happen to me… Especially in view of the sequel.”
“Sequel? What sequel? I can’t have sequels. In a story you always have to observe unity of time, place and action. Everything happening at the one time, in the same place, between the same people. The Necklace. Boule de Suif. The Maison Tellier. The examples are endless. What was this bloody sequel?”
The doctor puffed thoughtfully.
“In fact there were two sequels. Even three sequels. And all of them equally important.”
“In what way were they important?”
“It was rather important to me that after I was sent home I was in the hospital for four months. I could not sleep. I had constant nightmares, always the same one – me running through a wood and him running after me with his cane. I could not keep down my food. Sweating hot. Shivering cold. The vomiting was recurrent. I lost weight. My mother was beside herself with worry. She brought doctor after doctor to me, and only one of them spotted it, an old, blind man from Dublin named Whiteside. He said, ‘That boy has had some kind of shock,’ and in private he asked me if some boy, or man, had interfered with me. Of course, I denied it hotly.”
“I wish I was a doctor,” Morgan grumbled. “So many writers were doctors. Chekhov. William Carlos Williams. Somerset Maugham. A.J. Cronin.”
The doctor ignored the interruption.
“The second sequel was that when I at last went back to Mount Saint Bernard my whole nature changed. Before that I had been dreamy and idle. During my last four years at school I became their top student. I suppose psychologists would say nowadays that I compensated by becoming extroverted. I became a crack cricket player. In my final year I was the college champion at billiards. I never became much good at rugger but I no longer minded playing it and I wasn’t all that bad. If I’d been really tops at it, or at boxing, or swimming I might very well have ended up as captain of the school. Like him.”
He paused for so long that Morgan became alerted again.
“And the third sequel?” he prompted.
“I really don’t know why I am telling you all this. I have never told a soul about it before. Even still I find it embarrassing to think about, let alone to talk about. When I left Mount Saint Bernard and had taken my final at the College of Surgeons I went on to Austria to continue my medical studies. In Vienna I fell in with a young woman. The typical blonde fräulein, handsome, full of life, outgoing, wonderful physique, what you might call an outdoor girl, free as the wind, frank as the daylight. She taught me skiing. We used to go mountain climbing together. I don’t believe she knew the meaning of the word fear. She was great fun and the best of company. Her name was Brigitte. At twenty-six she was already a woman of the world. I was twenty-four, and as innocent of women as … as …”
To put him at his ease Morgan conceded his own embarrassing confession.
“As I am, at twenty-four.”
“You might think that what I am going to mention could not happen to a doctor, however young, but on our first night in bed, immediately she touched my body I vomited. I pretended to her that I had eaten something that upset me. You can imagine how nervous I felt all through the next day wondering what was going to happen that night. Exactly the same thing happened that night. I was left with no option. I told her the whole miserable story of myself and Bruiser twelve years before. As I started to tell her I had no idea how she was going to take it. Would she leave me in disgust? Be coldly sympathetic? Make a mock of me? Instead, she became wild with what I can only call gleeful curiosity. ‘Tell me more, mein Schätzerl,’ she begged. ‘Tell me everything! What exactly did he do to you? I want to know it all. This is wunderbar. Tell me! Oh do tell me!’ I did tell her, and on the spot everything became perfect between us. We made love like Trojans. That girl saved my sanity.”
In a silence Morgan gazed at him. Then coldly: –
“Well, of course, this is another story altogether. I mean I don’t see how I can possibly blend these two themes together. I mean no writer worth his salt can say things like, ‘Twelve long years passed over his head. Now read on.’ I’d have to leave her out of it. She is obviously irrelevant to the main theme. Whatever the hell the main theme is.” Checked by an ironical glance he poured the balm. “Poor Frank! I foresee it all. You adored her. You wanted madly to marry her. Her parents objected. You were star-crossed lovers. You had to part.”
“I never thought of marrying the bitch. She had the devil’s temper. We had terrible rows. Once we threw plates at one another. We would have parted anyway. She was a lovely girl but quite impossible. Anyway, towards the end of that year my father fell seriously ill. Then my mother fell ill. Chamberlain was in Munich that year. Everybody knew the war was coming. I came back to Ireland that autumn. For keeps.
“But you tried again and again to find out what happened to her. And failed. She was swallowed up in the fire and smoke of war. I don’t care what you say, Frank, you must have been heartbroken.”
The doctor lifted a disinterested shoulder.
“A student’s love affair? Of thirty and more years ago?”
No! He had never enquired. Anyway if she was alive now what would she be but a fat, blowsy old baggage of sixty-three? Morgan, though shocked, guffawed dutifully. There was the real Maupassant touch. In his next story a touch like that! The clock on the mantelpiece whirred and began to tinkle the hour. Morgan opened the album for a last look at the beautiful child. Dejectedly he slammed it shut, and rose.
“There is too much in it,” he declared. “Too many strands. Your innocence. His ignorance. Her worldliness. Your forgetting her. Remembering him. Confusion and bewilderment. The ache of loss? Loss? Lost Innocence? Would that be a theme? But nothing rounds itself off. You are absolutely certain you never heard of him again after that day behind the tennis courts?”
They were both standing now. The rain brightly spotted the midnight window.
“In my first year in Surgeons, about three years after Bruiser was killed, I lunched one day with his mother and my mother at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. By chance they had been educated at the same convent in England. They talked about him. My mother said, ‘Frank here knew him in Mount Saint Bernard.’ His mother smiled condescendingly at me. ‘No, Frank. You were too young to have met him.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I did actually speak to him a couple of times, and he was always very kind to me.’ She said sadly, ‘He was kind to everybody. Even to perfect strangers.’”
Morgan thrust out an arm and a wildly wagging finger.
“Now, there is a possible shape! Strangers to begin. Strangers to end! What a title! Perfect Strangers.” He blew out a long, impatient breath and shook his head. “But that is a fourth sequel! I’ll think about it,” as if he were bestowing a great favour. “But it isn’t a story as it stands. I would have to fake it up a lot. Leave out things. Simplify. Mind you, I could still see it as an idyll. Or I could if only you hadn’t torn up his last, farewell letter, which I still don’t believe at all said what you said it said. If only we had that letter I bet you any money we could haul in the line and land our fish.”
The doctor knocked out the dottle of his pipe against the fireguard, and throating a yawn looked at the fading fire.
“I am afraid I have been boring you with my reminiscences.”
“Not at all, Frank! By no means! I was most interested in your story. And I do honestly mean what I said. I really will think about it. I promise. Who was it,” he asked in the hall as he shuffled into his overcoat and his muffler and moved out to the wet porch, the tail of his raincoat rattling in the wind, “said that the two barbs of childhood are its innocence and its ignorance?” He failed to remember. He threw up his hand. “Ach, to hell with it for a story! It’s all too bloody convoluted for me. And to hell with Maupassant, too! That vulgarian oversimplified everything. And he’s full of melodrama. A besotted Romantic at heart! Like all the bloody French.”
The doctor peeped out at him through three inches of door. Morgan, standing with his back to the arrowy night, suddenly lit up as if a spotlight had shone on his face.
“I know what I’ll do with it!” he cried. “I’ll turn it into a poem about a seashell!”
“About a seashell!”
“Don’t you remember?” In his splendid voice Morgan chanted above the rain and wind: – “‘A curious child holding to his ear/ The convolutions of a smoothlipped seashell/ To which, in silence hushed …’ How the hell does it go? ‘… his very soul listened to the murmurings of his native sea.’ It’s as clear as daylight, man! You! Me! Everyone! Always wanting to launch a boat in search of some far-off golden sands. And something or somebody always holding us back. ‘The Curious Child’. There’s a title!”
“Ah, well!” the doctor said, peering at him blankly. “There it is! As your friend Maupassant might have said, ‘C’est la vie!’”
“La vie!” Morgan roared, now on the gravel beyond the porch, indifferent to the rain pelting on his bare head. “That trollop? She’s the one who always bitches up everything. No, Frank! For me there is only one fountain of truth, one beauty, one perfection. Art, Frank! Art! and bugger la vie!”
At the untimely verb the doctor’s drooping eyelids shot wide open.
“It is a view,” he said courteously and let his hand be shaken fervently a dozen times.
“I can never repay you, Frank. A splendid dinner. A wonderful story. Marvellous inspiration. I must fly. I’ll be writing it all night!” – and vanished head down through the lamplit rain, one arm uplifted triumphantly behind him.
The doctor slowly closed his door, carefully locked it, bolted it, tested it, and prudently put its chain in place. He returned to his sitting room, picked up the cinder that had fallen into the hearth and tossed it back into the remains of his fire, then stood, hand on mantelpiece, looking down at it. What a marvellous young fellow! He would be tumbling and tossing all night over that story. Then he would be around in the morning apologizing, and sympathizing, saying, “Of course, Frank, I do realize that it was a terribly sad experience for both of you.”
Gazing at the ashes his whole being filled with memory after memory like that empty vase in his garden being slowly filled by drops of rain.
A FAMILY MAN
V.S. Pritchett
V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997)was the best short story writer in English during the twentieth century. There should be no argument about this. He was born in 1900 and died ninety-seven years later having written two brilliant memoirs – A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil – and several excellent biographies, including Chekhov. Chatto & Windus published his Collected Short Stories and Collected Essays in 1991, and it says something about our culture that neither are still in print.
Late in the afternoon, when she had given him up a
nd 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?”
Berenice was offended by the word “place”. “This is Miss Foster’s residence. I am she.”
“Ah,” said the woman, babyish no longer but sugary. “I was given your address at the College. You teach at the College, I believe? I’ve come about the repair.”