‘You lose half a point! And I thought you said you were a good shot.’
‘I am. I thought I saw something moving to the left.’
‘Maybe I should check the bait. They might have stolen it.’
‘Do you often refer to books you haven’t read?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, why refer to a book that you haven’t read?’
‘Which book? Camus?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I suppose it’s a professional habit.’
He smiled and took his mobile phone out of his pocket, holding it to his ear. It hadn’t rung or vibrated, and as far as I was concerned no one had called.
‘Hello?’ He waited for the person on the other end to speak, and after a moment hung up.
I wondered who it had been, but acted as though I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary in his answering a phone that wasn’t ringing, and then hanging up without saying a word by way of conversation or even acknowledgement.
‘It was Louise,’ he said, guessing my thoughts. ‘I said I’d meet her after work.’
I nodded and left. He’d written seven novels and a series of travel books, though he’d rather quote something he hadn’t read than talk about his own work. I’d made sure to check, of course. He’d won literary prizes and had written articles for the English papers, even if none of his books were available at the bookshop I’d been to. Or at least not in French.
Nevertheless, I decided to follow him. His strangely silent phone calls unsettled me, and as I’d predicted he made his way to one of the massage parlours further along the promenade behind an abandoned hotel.
I found it unlikely that he was writing a travel guide to Belgium, spending the winter detailing this particular desolate stretch of the Flanders coast.
Perhaps I was his guide, a fellow stranger in hell.
I waited at the corner of the street for a moment, before turning down the narrow alley in time to catch sight of a door closing at the rear of the dilapidated hotel. I was unfortunate enough to have been inside on more than one occasion, and I had no intention either of following him beyond that black door or waiting around in the damp cold outside. I would rather go back to my small apartment and the nightmares that were waiting for me there.
The first rat appeared in my apartment not long after Nicholas had returned to England to settle matters pertaining to the private affair at which he had only ever hinted. As a parting gift, he had left me his child’s gun, a tin of lead pellets and a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus, in English.
I have never been able to read English with much proficiency, and I thought that reading the novel in the evenings would give me the opportunity to learn the complexities of the written language. Perhaps I could leave Belgium and travel by boat across the grey sea that I sat and stared at so often, hidden in the back of a truck like so many others, again to prostrate myself at the feet of one more labyrinthine bureaucracy.
It seemed strange that Nicholas hadn’t thought to make a present of one of his own novels, instead leaving me with something written over half a century earlier, something that had only been mentioned in passing during one of our conversations. I realised that during the many evenings I had spent at his small apartment I had never once seen any evidence of his being in the process of writing a travel companion to Belgium, and by the time I decided to visit an Internet café to look up his name I already knew that, this time, nothing concerning his existence would be found.
Perhaps I had entirely imagined him, so many months of solitary confinement affecting my mind to the extent that I had invented the acquaintance of an English novelist. Next, no doubt, I would become friends with a lion tamer or an Arctic explorer, each filling my head with plots and global conspiracies. But who am I to complain? I gave Nicholas, like so many before him, only so much of myself as was necessary to move things along: an incident or two from my childhood; a scene from an early love; an injury playing football. And, of course, when he talked of the war in Syria, I said nothing, only nodding my head in agreement with his general sentiments.
Of course, I had my suspicions – suspicions confirmed by a second afternoon spent at the Internet café. I have grown weary of computers, but this time I found no evidence of the existence of an English writer named Nicholas Boyle: only an American, coincidentally thin and balding in the few photographs of him available, though otherwise a different person. Perhaps I had been mistaken in my first searches, though, of course, it’s easy to become paranoid. Not being English, I was unable to discern during our conversations whether he spoke the language with any kind of an accent, but I naturally assumed that he was working for Belgian intelligence, and that the Belgian travel guide he was supposedly writing was nothing but a clever little story.
During our meetings, what I presume to be a mild form of silent Tourette’s would surface within my mind, and I would sit and pretend to listen to him talking, while image after image played somewhere behind my eyes, each demanding to be narrated. The small child with a face like a flattened mummy’s, her hands frozen in surprise at the instant of death, her pink pyjamas. The Arabic letter left unfinished in an old-fashioned typewriter beside a glass of tea on a table in an abandoned building, the letter’s writer somehow dead in the hall. A dozen bloated bodies floating along the river as we sat and ate in the shade of a tree, their hands tied behind their backs.
How much they must dream of me telling them everything. How troubled they must be by my presence in their country. As if this grey patch of dirt were worth defending. And yet they are forced to play this game and to leave me be. Perhaps they are hoping that I can only bear so much of this depressing place before I hang myself from the rafters. A seaside town used for the purposes of psychological torture.
They have seen me drinking alcohol and visiting the massage parlour, and now they are waiting for a guilt-ridden act of retribution. I suspect that my apartment has been fitted with cameras and listening devices. I often get the sense that I am being followed along the street. Once or twice, I have been tempted to purchase the ingredients necessary to make a bomb, if only to provoke a reaction and to drag them out into the open.
I never read further than the first few pages of the book Nicholas had given to me, Albert Camus’ The Plague, even though I found the story intriguing, and the description of the first little rat to emerge from a hole in the wall rather appropriate.
Since a number of hotels had been infested, a local newspaper had covered the story of our own plague, concluding that the rats had been driven from the sewers by the destruction of a large municipal building in the centre of the town, the rodents somewhat confusedly making their way towards the sea, perhaps to put an end to their own misery, but finding the stretch of dilapidated buildings along the promenade much more suitable to their needs.
I have developed quite a loathing for them. I often dream that rat-like insects have infested my skin, that they are eating their way through the ventricles of my heart, unseen within my chest. I wake in a dismal panic, worried that I can hear something by my bed, my first thought to reach for the gun. Yet the banality of their deaths is rather amusing, their sudden stillness at the click of a child’s toy. As I drop them into the garbage, I have a smile for even those that have woken me from a pleasant dream.
Not that you should treat these rats as being in any way symbolic within the narrative of this story. That is certainly not my intention. Rats are rats, and I happen to have found myself in a seaside town where these particular rodents are rather numerous. Perhaps if we had found ourselves confronted by swarms of butterflies, things might have been different. Our narrative, too, might have taken a turn for the better. I could have wandered along the promenade, my arms held in the summer air, palms turned to the sky as a thousand kaleidoscopic wings flutter from my fingers. But chance has willed it otherwise.
Yesterday, I took th
e gun hidden in my coat pocket to the immigration office. I had been playing with the idea of waving it at one of the officials, in the hope that I would be shot in the heart by the police, but when I was informed of the loss of my papers and the necessity to resubmit all of the documents it took me so long to obtain, I only lowered my head and acquiesced to fulfil their requests. Afterwards, I sat on the beach with the gun in my hand, shooting at a gull and missing.
On my way back to my apartment and the small, depressing bed that is always waiting for me in the afternoons on my return from the immigration office, I stopped to buy some paper for the dozens of letters I knew I would now have to write. And so started this Belgian story, on nothing more than a whim, beginning on the night I met the English novelist in an empty bar . . . and leading I don’t know where.
DJ Taylor
Some Versions of Pastoral
The flowers in the Underwoods’ garden were all in bright, primary colours: yellows, blues and reds in charmless profusion. To negotiate them was to pass through the pages of a children’s picture book where all the animals had grown to fantastic sizes and nuance was forever kept at bay. Somewhere near at hand invisible insects buzzed ominously and there was a smell of aftershave. Further away, screened by giant hedges, to which an amateur topiarist had done untold damage, they could hear some animal or person thrashing about in the undergrowth. Buzz of bees; sickly scent; odd, chirruping noises deep in the foliage: the surprisingly sinister spell cast by these phenomena was suddenly broken by the sound of Mr Underwood’s voice – high, querulous and apparently belonging neither to man or woman – bursting through the verdure.
‘Hi! Over here! Through the gap in the bank. You know the way.’
They found the gap in the bank, which was more of a declivity caused by the earth falling away from the stumps of a couple of beech trees, and came tumbling out onto a square of emerald grass so scrupulously cut that it might have been manicured. Here other hedges rose on three sides to a height of eight or nine feet. There was no escape, either from the semi-circle of garden chairs, the occasional table spread with tea-things, or Mr and Mrs Underwood, who, proud and statuesque, like the elders of some benighted South American tribe, finally discovered in their Amazonian bolt-hole, sat waiting to receive them.
‘I suppose you had trouble in parking your car on the green,’ Mrs Underwood said, in a voice surprisingly like her husband’s. Tony looked at his watch and found that they were only three minutes late. ‘It does get rather clogged up at this time of year, what with all the trippers visiting the hall. There was a dreadful ice-cream van used to come and set up there,’ Mrs Underwood went on, ‘jangling its bell until all hours and making the air hideous, but Bunny got onto the parish council and put a stop to it.’
‘How dreadful for you to be inconvenienced like that,’ Jane said, who was less in awe of the Underwoods than her husband and could not resist teasing them when the opportunity presented itself.
How old were the Underwoods, Tony wondered, taking a closer look at the pair of cashmere-clad manikins, each with the same ley-lined faces and sun-cured skin, bolt upright in their chairs. Eighty? Eighty-five? And how long had he and Jane been visiting them? Twenty-five years? Thirty? All this time along the track he could not even recall their original connection with the Underwoods or what impulse continued to send them, annually, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to a part of Suffolk where the A-roads gave out, the sat-nav was cowed into incoherence and even the locals could not be relied upon for directions.
‘We were listening to a programme about Patrick Leigh Fermor on the wireless,’ Mrs Underwood said – her forename was either Oenone, or Christabel, he could never remember which – pronouncing Leigh Fermor’s name in a way that was new to him and pushing a tea-cup towards him, inch by inch, over the white-clothed table-top. ‘Now, you will be very careful of this, won’t you?’
What heights had the tea-cup scaled in its past life that such efforts had to be made to preserve it? Done service on some far-off Garsington lawn? Been sipped out of by one of the Bloomsbury Group? There were pictures of Virginia Woolf and Carrington on the wall of the Underwoods’ tiny drawing-room, and a bookcase harbouring the signed first editions of Cyril Connolly and Angus Wilson. It was a thoroughly innocuous piece of china, blue-and-white-striped, of a kind that you saw displayed in every roadside pottery the length and breadth of Cornwall, but nevertheless he brought his lips gratefully against its rim. The tea was Lapsang Souchong and rank as a civet, like ogres’ perfume.
‘I’m very fortunate to be able to welcome you at all,’ Mrs Underwood said, in an impossibly queenly way. ‘Why, this morning, taking the post in from the postman – such a nice man, but he will leave the parcels at the back door – I practically came a cropper on the step.’
Trippers. Wirelesses. Coming a cropper. There was a defiance about the manner in which Mrs Underwood dealt out these archaisms. The times had changed, but she would not. The reek of the aftershave turned out to come from her husband. Perhaps Mr Underwood was not quite such a barnacled adherent to the hull of the old world as his wife. Who could tell? The box hedges that surrounded them on three sides were quite impenetrable. Anything could have been concealed behind them: bare, empty plains; marauding armies; a hunt in wild halloo. Here in the Underwoods’ Suffolk garden they were cut off, surrounded, as detached as any plant in its pot.
‘The children send their . . .’ – he was going to say ‘love’, but then compromised on ‘best wishes.’ This was a lie. The children had long ago baulked at any amenities offered by the Underwoods. But he was more worried by the blue-and-white cup, Virginia’s nosegay, the repository of Cyril Connolly’s night-cap, or whatever it had done, which, like most other sanctified artefacts, had twice nearly bobbed out of his hand and had to be set down with a rattle and a slight spillage of tea on the table-top.
‘Daddy used to say,’ Mrs Underwood now volunteered, with what might have been an attempt at humour, ‘that children were a necessary affliction. Of course, Bunny and I never saw the need for them ourselves.’
A gust of wind, all unheralded, came dipping over the tops of the box hedges and blew up one of the fronds of Mr Underwood’s sparse, elf-white hair into a kind of quiff. As generally happened on these afternoons in Suffolk, with the Lapsang Souchong pungently abrew and the starlings racketing in the thickets, there came a moment when the jigsaw of their association fell neatly into place and he remembered, first, that Mrs Underwood’s father had been a literary man of the inter-war era whose diaries had been the subject of a contemptuous review in the Sunday Times, and, second, that Mr Underwood had been a director of the gentlemanly (and now defunct) publishing firm for which, a quarter of a century ago, Jane had served out her apprenticeship as a secretary-typist. There was another odd thing about Mr Underwood, Tony noticed, in addition to the reek of aftershave. He was wearing round his withered neck a small but punctiliously constructed daisy chain. There was something faintly macabre about this, as if he was about to take part in a pagan ritual, or the tea-cup, caught beneath his long, spatulate fingers, was brimful of virgins’ blood.
‘How is your book going?’ Jane asked, who tabled this question every time they came to the Underwoods’ and had once been rewarded with a story of how Evelyn Waugh had got stuck in the lavatory at a publishers’ lunch.
‘Yes, how is your book going?’ he joined in, thinking that such straws as these were there to be clutched at. But there were no more stories about Evelyn Waugh and defective door-keys, faint cries of abandonment echoing in far-off corridors, merely the sense of a painful subject recklessly disinterred by people who should have known better.
‘Oh, I’ve given it up,’ Bunny said, with a little cackle of disdain. Tony, who had been trying for some time to work out what he reminded him of, realised that it was a photograph of the aged Somerset Maugham shortly after his first injection of monkey-glands. ‘I decided that there are f
ar too many books in the world already. Heaven knows, I was responsible for hundreds of them myself. And then I don’t think anybody is really interested in Cyril these days.’
‘Of course, you know Bunny did nearly everything for Cyril towards the end,’ Mrs Underwood said loyally. ‘Got all those first editions sold for him at Sotheby’s. Published that collection of belles lettres for him when no one else would take it on. There was even some talk of his being appointed literary executor. And then when that dreadful man came to write the biography, there was hardly any mention of him at all.’
This was true, but it prompted other questions, mostly unanswerable. Could you rate your life on the number of index references you achieved in a biography of Cyril Connolly? Or the celebrated mouths that had bent to drink out of one of your tea-cups seventy years ago? Mr Underwood looked as if he were going to say something else about his memoirs, whose provisional title, Tony now recalled, had been Dawn in Wardour Street, and then thought better of it. The breeze was still swerving in over the box hedges and sending little fragments of wood-chip cartwheeling over the virid grass.
‘Did you see the documentary about Benjamin Britten on BBC Four the other day?’ Jane asked bravely. ‘There were some very nice shots of Aldeburgh.’
But the Underwoods had not seen the programme about Benjamin Britten. Neither had they heard of the Corot exhibition at the Tate of whose contents Jane now gamely offered details. Each year the range of their cultural interests shrank a little further while their disapproval of the life lived out beyond their Suffolk fastness increased. This did not make conversation easy, a fact that Mrs Underwood, to do her justice, seemed to appreciate.
‘Of course, we are dreadful recluses,’ she said at one point. ‘But then, we did our share of gadding about the world in our day, and one can’t keep up that kind of thing forever.’
Best British Short Stories 2016 Page 6