The Collected Short Stories

by Jean Rhys

  Her arms fell to her sides as she watched them running across the grass to the house. That was the first time she knew.

  Kismet

  On tour the principals were always given the best dressing-rooms while the chorus had to make do with the least convenient and the coldest. As a rule the long interval was the time for dirty stories, singing parodies of popular songs, jokes about an old black sofa in the London office, known, of course, as the casting couch, and shrieks of laughter.

  The dresser hovered ready to fetch drinks, usually Guinness; gin and whisky were reserved for birthdays and great occasions, like the time when we all bet on the winner of the Grand National. One of the girls was a great friend of the man who owned the horse. She gave us the tip. ‘My little Lambie says he’s a dead certainty and it’s been kept very quiet. Now’s your chance!’

  That week the theatre in a North of England town was brand new and we had a warm room with plenty of space. During the interval we could sit round a good fire, something we certainly were not used to, and nearly everyone was busy sewing when a girl called Gaby said: ‘Have you heard about China Gordon? She’s dead – and you owe me a bob, Billie.’

  ‘Why?’ Billie said. ‘What for?’ Billie was the girl I was sharing rooms with that week.

  ‘Because you bet me a bob that that pink on her cheeks was make-up. Bloom of Roses you said, and I bet that it was natural. She died of consumption and all consumptive people have those round pink spots on their cheekbones. It seems that she got worse suddenly and some man sent her to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Very expensive. But she died all the same.’ Billie handed over the shilling.

  ‘You seem to know all about it.’

  ‘Yes, I heard this morning. I’m not saying China wasn’t pretty because she was, but a bit like one of those living on the halls, don’t you think? And most men didn’t like her so what was the use?’

  China was the youngest of the three Gordon sisters. They had been in the chorus with us and all were pretty. But China was a really lovely girl. One of her greatest beauties was her skin, at once transparent and velvety. Someone had called her Dresden China and soon she was always known as China.

  The Gordons were often asked by admirers to supper after the show and the other girls were very jealous of them, especially of silent China. So there was great glee when Mollie, the eldest, reading one of her invitations, began to laugh: ‘Listen to this man. “P.S. But for God’s sake don’t bring China!”’

  After one tour they had been snatched up by George Edwardes, who was said to have scouts all over the country, on the watch for girls for the Gaiety chorus.

  ‘China was really very stupid,’ Gaby said.

  ‘That’s enough about her,’ Billie said. ‘She’s dead, poor girl.’

  ‘Why poor girl? Damn lucky girl, if you ask me.’ This was Yetta.

  Yetta was tall and thin. She always wore a broad black velvet ribbon round her throat and a beauty patch. She must have been very attractive long ago but now she was well over thirty, well over forty, nobody knew. She was the one who drank whisky instead of Guinness, who lived alone and had very little to do with anyone else. She’d been the mistress of a well-known actor-manager and played in the West End – bit parts in straight plays. Everyone understood that after all that, being in the chorus of a touring company must be quite a change. Though aloof, she wasn’t unpopular. Even Royce, our stage manager, treated her with a certain amount of respect.

  No one had ever seen her anything else but dignified and self-possessed but tonight she hadn’t stopped at one whisky; she’d been drinking steadily and, if she was celebrating, she hadn’t told us why. ‘Yetta, don’t drink any more or you won’t be able to go down for the finale,’ somebody said.

  ‘So I won’t be there for the finale, so I won’t be there. And who cares? I don’t.’

  Sure enough, when the callboy shouted and we all got ready to troop down to the stage, she didn’t budge. She was crying when we came back, with her head in her arms. Most of the girls, after one embarrassed glance, took no notice of her but Gaby said in a loud whisper: ‘Seems we’ve got one of those ruins that Cromwell knocked about with us. How does she think she’s going to get home after all that whisky?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Gaby, shut up!’ Billie said. ‘We’ll take her home.’

  ‘Why don’t you shut up yourself, Billie Carly? Always telling people what they must say and what they mustn’t say.’

  ‘I could blow you out of the window if I said what I thought about you,’ Billie said.

  But the quarrel simmered down for everybody wanted to get home and soon they all drifted out and we were left alone with Yetta.

  ‘Come on, ducks,’ said Billie. ‘Take your make-up off. Here’s your dress.’

  Yetta sat up. ‘If I told you that I used to be one of the prettiest girls on the London stage, you wouldn’t believe me, would you?’

  ‘Of course I’d believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t care if you don’t,’ Yetta said. ‘You can’t change what’s happened just because you don’t believe it. Let me tell you that none of you will be seeing much more of me when this bloody tour is over and it’s nobody’s business what I do instead.’

  ‘Yetta, we haven’t all night to chat,’ Billie said.

  Between us we got her dressed and down three flights of stone stairs. When she leant heavily on us Billie would say: ‘Gawd Norry, what a weight!’ But once in the street she shook us off. ‘Thanks, but I can manage. Leave me alone is all I ask.’ She walked away unsteadily.

  We had a key to the house where we lived. It was in darkness, like all the other houses in the street, but the little sitting-room was warm, there was a blue pinpoint of gaslight, two glasses of milk, plates on the table and a covered dish by the fire.

  ‘Lucky I’m not hungry,’ said Billie, when she lifted the cover. ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  It was late but we weren’t sleepy either and as the bedroom would be icy we sat sipping milk and talking in low voices so as not to wake the landlady. She wasn’t a bad old thing though it was always tepid boiled onions for supper.

  Billie said: ‘Yetta’s silly to drink at her age but she’s quite right. I’m not coming back next tour if I can help it. I’m stopping in London. Besides, my husband wants me to have a baby.’

  ‘Oh Billie, are you married, you never told me, do you like him, is he nice?’

  ‘He’d pass in a crowd with a shove,’ Billie said. ‘But he’s not the real reason, it’s that I don’t get paid enough for the work I do. After all I understudy two of the principals. If they think they can go on being stingy for much longer, they’re wrong, I’m off.’

  ‘Well, Billie, you could easily get something else. You look lovely from the front, and your voice is pretty good. I heard Royce say that you were a first-rate dancer. He isn’t a man to fling compliments about, is he?’

  ‘But don’t you see, that’s exactly why they’ll try to keep me as a blasted understudy all my life? They know that I could go on any night and not let the show down. I’m useful to them. But when I get like poor old Yetta they’ll give me the push pretty damn quick.’

  ‘Why don’t you try another management if you don’t get on with this one?’

  ‘Because I’ve signed a contract. I can’t walk out without any excuse. If they got annoyed, I mightn’t find it very easy to get work, all these people are pals, you know.’

  ‘Billie, they wouldn’t do that!’

  ‘Wouldn’t they if they felt like it? Oh Norry, you are a sloppy girl, it’s pitiful really. But,’ she said, ‘I could have a perfectly good excuse and they couldn’t do anything about it. By the time it was all over they’d have forgotten about me.’

  ‘When what was all over?’

  ‘The baby, of course.’

  ‘Billie, don’t tell me that you’re going to have a baby?’

  ‘Of course not, that’s not what I mean, but what’s
to stop me writing from London, saying I’m going to have a baby? What could they do?’ She stared into the fire. ‘Remember that fortune teller who got into the dressing-room at Blackburn?’

  ‘Yes I remember. She looked at my hand for a long time and told me that there was going to be a big change in my life.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean a thing. They say that when they can’t think up anything else. But with me she was serious. She said I’d have two children, a boy and a girl.’

  ‘But Billie, it’s not the fortune teller, I’ve been feeling it all this tour, something is going to happen that will change my life. I know it, it’s Kismet.’

  ‘Kismet’s only a word for good luck or bad luck.’

  ‘No it isn’t. It means that you haven’t much to do with what happens or what becomes of you. Not really. If it’s meant, it’ll happen.’

  ‘I never heard such nonsense. People have a hell of a lot to do with what happens to them.’

  ‘They think they have. That’s the idea.’

  ‘Sounds like one of these fancy religions,’ Billie said. ‘If I were you I’d keep clear of fancy religions. They’re all the same. When they’re trying to get hold of you they only tell you the half. When you find out the other half, as of course you do, you wish you had never got mixed up. You don’t believe all this, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t say I believed in it but sometimes I wonder. I’m sure that what happens to me won’t be anything I’ve planned or even want, but it will happen.’

  ‘Well don’t go on about it!’ Billie said. ‘Whatever happens to you it will all be the same in a hundred years.’

  After the tour I didn’t see Billie for over a year. I’d left the company, was living in London, and I hardly thought of her, but she’d given me an address somewhere near Belsize Park, and one day when I was up in that direction I went to see if she was there.

  She came to the door when I knocked. Fatter and with a set look about her face and figure that I didn’t remember. ‘Hello, Norry, where’ve you sprung from? Come in, what a surprise!’

  We went into a sitting-room rather like the ones on tour. From the next room I could hear a baby crying.

  ‘Sit down, I won’t be a minute. I’ve got to see His Majesty.’

  There were two candlesticks on the mantelpiece. I was thinking how much I liked them when she called: ‘Come and have a look at him now.’

  He was an ordinary baby, just like other babies. I said: ‘Aren’t they sweet when the laugh and gurgle and wave their arms about’, and couldn’t think of anything else. She was telling me how marvellous he was when he went to sleep suddenly, but back in the sitting-room she went on about him, how sweet he smelt when he’d just had a bath. ‘Then they look at you and clutch at you and your heart turns over.’

  ‘I do like your candlesticks,’ I said, to change the subject.

  ‘Yes, Fred made those, he’s very clever like that.’

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ I said. ‘I suppose when the baby’s older you’ll go back to the stage? That’s what you planned, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I haven’t time to think about all that now. The fortune teller told me a boy and a girl, didn’t she? I wouldn’t mind having a little girl. I’d rather like to have a little girl.’

  ‘You seem to be all fixed up,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all very well but let me tell you there’s one thing a baby can do. You stop wondering why you’re alive at all. You know how sometimes you get depressed and think what the hell’s it all about and why, and so on? With a baby you stop thinking like that. At least I’ve stopped.’

  ‘Other things can do that, not only babies.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not the same thing, not the same thing at all. Because you’re never quite sure. Fred’s away a lot and I simply hate being alone but a baby’s there for quite a long time.’

  When she said that I began to think about being alone. Sometimes I wonder whether anybody in the world is as alone as I am now, not even hearing another voice except the landlady’s ‘Rain again’, or, ‘Perhaps we might have a bit of sun today.’

  Unhappy? I’ve never been so happy in my life. But a day can be long when you’re waiting for the night and a week can be for ever. I’m not exactly frightened. There’s no reason. None. More of a hollow feeling. Perhaps if I talked about it, even a little, it would be a good thing.

  But just as I was thinking this Billie began to yawn. She yawned and yawned and didn’t seem able to stop. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Norry, but I don’t get much sleep, you know. I’ll make some tea.’

  While we were drinking the tea I stopped wanting to tell her anything. Billie, of all people. For a soppy idea that’s a soppy idea if ever there was one.

  Soon I said: ‘Well, I must be going. Lovely to see you, we must meet some time’, knowing, as I said it, that I didn’t want ever to see her again.

  Walking down Haverstock Hill I thought how changed she was. Then I forgot all about her as I began wondering, as usual, if there’d be a telegram or letter waiting for me. ‘My darling kitten,’ the letter would start. ‘My darling kitten.’ Perhaps I’d see him tonight. Perhaps tomorrow. I began to plan what dress I’d wear, for I had plenty to choose from now.

  The Whistling Bird

  I first saw Liliane, my cousin, at one of the few old estate houses left in Dominica – a baby a few weeks old. She was dark, small, and silent, except that every now and again she would wail, a thin, strange cry, as if she were protesting being born. I was told that she was very delicate and not expected to live, and I remember my grandmother saying something about the sins of the fathers being visited on the children. My grandmother was full of these threatening Biblical quotations, though I don’t think that she was at all a religious woman. Soon after this I left the island for England and school.

  I met Liliane again in a St Lucia hotel during my first visit to the West Indies for many years. She was then in her twenties – a tall, energetic girl in spite of my grandmother’s prophecies. I had lost touch with many of my West Indian relatives, and I heard for the first time of her family’s changed circumstances. Her father had died suddenly, leaving very little money, and his widow and three children were obliged to give up the estate. The son, who was called Don, joined very composedly in talk about their future plans. Then one day he got up from the table at the end of a meal, went into the bedroom, and shot himself. There were various explanations of this. When in England, he’d been anxious to join the Navy. Perhaps he had failed an exam and was unable to forget it. Perhaps he suddenly saw what his future life would be and couldn’t face it. Anyway, that was the end of Don. He was eighteen. His mother, whom I remembered so well as pretty Evelina, went back to St Lucia, the island where she was born, with her two daughters. There she met an English woman who, planning to start a hotel outside Castries, befriended, or perhaps made use of, the entire family. Intelligent Liliane was the cashier, pretty Monica the receptionist, Evelina the manageress, who dealt with the staff and the food, for she knew a lot about real French Creole cooking, which can be delicious.

  We stayed several weeks at this hotel, and I found it very attractive. I was happy there. One afternoon when I asked for tea, the tray was brought up to my room by a woman dressed in the old fashion, in what used to be called the grande robe – a long, gaily coloured high-waisted dress, a turban, and heavy gold earrings. It was the past majestically walking in.

  I did not see very much of Liliane. It was Monica who told me about her long, lonely walks at night – she often didn’t come back till dawn, though she was at work early – and that she edited a magazine, writing all the stories, calling herself by different names: ‘Lady Amelia’, ‘Onlooker’, and so on. But there was usually a short poem, which she signed with her initials, L. L. I remember one about English Harbour in Antigua, once Nelson’s headquarters but then in ruins, not yet dolled up for tourists, and supposed to be haunted by a Lieutenant Peterson: a long romance about Lieutenant Peterson, wick
ed Lord Camelford, Captain Best, and a masked ball, belonging more to the old West Indies than to the West Indies as it is now. I was back in London when I had a letter from Liliane, telling me of Monica’s death: the old story – a young Englishman to whom she was engaged had left the island without explanation. When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to write or return, she went to bed and was dead in a couple of weeks. For Evelina this was one misfortune too many, and she gave up and died soon afterward. Liliane, the survivor, wrote that she was coming to London, and it was there that I met her and got to know more of her.

  She was a strange girl, shying away from any attempt to help her, insisting that what she did was her own business and no one else’s. I have never known anyone who kept her contacts with other people so formal. She never said ‘I’ll come tomorrow afternoon’ but ‘I’ll be with you tomorrow at a quarter to four and I’ll leave at half past five.’ So it would be. She had found a job, she told me, and something about her voice made me sure it wasn’t a well-paid job, or one she liked or wished to talk about.

  She lived in a small bed-sitting-room beyond Hampstead. In one corner was a silver tea service brought from the West Indies. Also to my surprise, she had the portrait of Old Lockhart, her great-grandfather and mine, who had arrived in the West Indies at the end of the eighteenth century. He stared as blankly as ever. It was impossible to know whether he was a bad man or a good man lied about, or someone who just did what everyone else did without thinking too much about it. The Spanish great-grandmother, whom I’d always been so curious about, wasn’t there. Liliane didn’t talk much about her past or the West Indies but did talk a good deal about her love for England, London, and the Royal Family. Someone once said of her, ‘I can’t keep my face straight when I’m talking to that old Rip Van Winkle.’

  ‘Be patient with her – she’s an anachronism,’ I said.