Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  We find letters. Canadians were stationed here during the war and must have left suddenly, for there is a room of their unsent mail, and we read it to one another, feeling a trifle ashamed, but also as if we are performing a necessary ritual, freeing the words into the forgiving air. Dear Maude, we read, I’m missing you dreadfully, and wish I were back in Spiritwood. Or Darling, Why haven’t you written me? I thought we were in love. Or Dear Ma and Pa, I’m scared. We wonder which of them lived to say these words in person, and which of them are lying in close-packed graves marked with white crosses, or lost under the drifting Flanders mud.

  I sleep better, up here at the school. It is partly the sense of coming home, for the place is more familiar to me than my mother’s circumscribed life in Dorking. When my father died – something I realise I share with Le Strange, although my father’s death was neither so dramatic nor so random – my mother retreated into herself, into a pinched, pointed widowhood. Up in the dormitory, with Bingo in the bed to my left, Ginger and Le Strange opposite, I feel life seeping back into my bones.

  We talk with lights out – about our schooldays, about girls, about our dreams for the future. Le Strange tells us about Veronica, before the war. ‘She had hair that bounced when she laughed,’ he says, his voice heavy with memory. ‘What she saw in me, I’ll never know. I used to take her in my arms and stroke that laughing hair.’ I remember for them a cricket match in o-nine. I’d scored a century for the first eleven. ‘It was the last time I saw my father. My mother had him there in his bath chair. When I got my hundred, I raised my bat to him, and I could tell that it took all the life he had left in him just to raise his arm. But he did, and he smiled, a wide, proud smile that gave a new light to my whole childhood. They didn’t wait for me to come in from the crease. Mother pushed him squeaking away, and the next day he was dead.’ Ginger tells us about his wedding, in Frome, and the blossom that fell from the trees into his young wife’s hair, the sense that he was six feet taller than any other man there, when she took his hand and called him her husband. ‘What was her name?’ Le Strange asks. ‘Rebecca. Becky.’ Ginger’s voice cracks when he says it. Bingo just sighs. Then we sleep, and only rarely do I wake, taloning the air, from dreams tinged gas-mask green.

  During the days we walk, either in the school grounds or up on the Downs, for spring has finally broken, the rain stopped, and life is slowly, hesitantly, crawling out from under the rock of the war. Yellowhammers bounce through the air above us, cow parsley throngs in deep clumps beside the footpaths, rabbits twitch at our approach. We play long games of cricket on the overgrown pitches, or kick a rugger ball while Le Strange watches, stretching his bad leg out in front of him.

  It is a spring of sublime sunsets, so that the long eastern walls of the empty classrooms are painted peach and gold in the evenings, and the four of us sit watching the light fade, listening to the swell of all the birds of Sussex, singing in the hills. As time passes, I feel myself growing stronger, younger even. It is as if we have entered some sacred grove whose nepenthean air has overthrown all the ills of the young century, and we are back where we began.

  One afternoon in May, I’m out walking with Le Strange on the hills. We can see the glimmering sea away to the south, the coil of the river through the valley. We speak of the golden summer of ’fourteen, when Le Strange was up at Oxford and I’d just taken a position in foreign accounts at Lloyds. We cusp a hill and it seems as if we could reach out and run our fingers through the wisps of mares’-tail clouds that sit above the water. We loll back on a bank of tussocky grass and it is hot and good with the heavens above and the soft earth below. I half-listen to Le Strange, half-float off into sleep, and always the chirping of birds, the whisper of the warm air.

  ‘My time here,’ Le Strange says, ‘got me through the war. I used to curl up in my kip or in the funk-hole, a choir of shells singing out over me, the Hun’s breath down my bloody neck, and I’d close my eyes and I’d be here. I’d be playing cricket or chatting to the chaps over tiffin or waking early and going for a jog in the grounds.’ Something in his voice changes and I look over at him, but he’s still canted back, his hands behind his head. ‘Do you dream now?’ he asks. ‘Here, I mean.’

  ‘Sometimes. Less than when I was in London.’

  ‘They can be bastards, dreams.’

  ‘I had the same dream,’ I say, ‘every night for a month. Used to wake with the ticker going like billy-o, sweat-drenched and screaming. It was like a coffin lid pressing down on me, that dream.’

  ‘I know,’ he says.

  ‘In the dream, I’m running bent double through a labyrinth of trenches. You remember the way some duckboards would give, so you didn’t know if you’d sink? Every one is like that, every step unsteady. Now the trenches get lower and lower, until they’re no bigger than dug-outs, and I can feel the eyes on my back, can hear the Prussian machine gunners popping at me. But on I run.

  ‘Soon, the trenches end, and I’m sprinting across a field, stumbling through shell-holes, pounding my feet on the soft, giving earth until I realise that it’s not earth but bodies, that I’m stamping down on the corpses of my pals, and there’s Ginger and Bingo down there, still squirming, their eyes gone, their legs stumps, their mouths screaming silently. I keep on running, because that is the logic of the dream.

  ‘Finally, I come up into a French town, bomb-blasted and crumbling, and I step over the rubble where a church used to be, through the ruins of a house that looks very much like the house I grew up in. Ahead of me, in the wide emptiness of the town square, I see a child, maybe five years old, and I realise that it is me, as a child, and that this is why I’m here.’ I look down towards the sea, where a flotilla of sailboats has appeared, sails bobbing gaily. ‘I run towards the child and suddenly the sky is filled with shells, and they fall like heavy hail around us. They’re phosgene – that dreadful smell of new-mown hay, the sulphurous eddies of cloud – and I pull on my gas mask and carry on towards the child, but he’s down’ – I’m crying now, tears flowing fast and unfelt – ‘and when I reach him, there’s blood and spume in his mouth, and he’s not moving.’ I’m sobbing, and I can’t speak any more, can’t tell him about the weight of the body in my arms, how light it felt, as if life were substantial. Le Strange reaches over and puts his arm around me, then both arms.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ he whispers. ‘We’re home.’ He places a kiss on my cheek. Wind through wheat has left dust on his lips, and he presses them to mine for a brief, hot moment. He leans his head back to look at me, like a man inspecting the menu in a restaurant. ‘We’re going to get better, you know.’

  Spring kindles into summer, and we spend our days reading in the cool high rooms of the school’s many towers, windows left open to the breeze, or down by the river. There is a willow tree on the banks from whose branches we swing, sending ourselves up in great whooping arcs and then down into the cool freshness of the water. Our bodies, stretched naked on the grass and sand after swimming, are repaired and restored by the sunshine; skin firms and scars fade and we look more like we did, ten years before, when we’d come down here and float, star-shaped, until the bell called us up for tiffin.

  I find a copy of Chekhov’s stories in one of the masters’ old studies, and we sit in the sunshine by the fast clear river and I read ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and ‘About Love’ and ‘Angel’. Ginger stirs the water with a stick as I read, Le Strange sits with his eyes turned up towards me, Bingo cries silent tears, his fist pressed to his mouth. The stories unknit something in us, and in the depths of them we find parts of ourselves that we feared lost forever.

  A blanket of downy dust has fallen over the furniture in the school. It sits in shifting drifts on the floor, renders solid the sunshine that spears in through high windows, gives the air a hazy, dreamlike quality. We have been outside so much, you see, and anyway are flimsy things, our skinny bodies unlikely to disturb the dust as we pass. Wh
en you have lived as we lived for three, four years, mud-spattered, bent-over, never dry, you barely notice things like dust, or the weeds that begin to grow in through the windows, to curl through the boarded-up door to the cellar.

  It is in late summer – and there, I’m already speaking as if it’s dead – that things begin to unravel. Perhaps we were foolish to think that we could go on like that, living apart from the world. For each of us, even Le Strange, had lives outside the school, had dreams and obligations, promises to keep. We still pictured ourselves in the future, holding a soft-skinned baby, perhaps. But if the world had not irrupted into our sanctuary, who knows how long we might have lasted on our island?

  One Saturday morning, Rebecca, Ginger’s wife, arrives at the school. We hear the creak of the oak doors in the entrance hall, which we rarely use, and we scuttle up the stairs, into shadows, looking through the bars of the bannisters. She’s pretty, early twenties, dark hair falling down onto her shoulders like a stain. She takes off her gloves and runs a long finger over the dust on the table. She stands looking up at the notice boards, and we see the tear that drops, surprising her, when she catches sight of Ginger’s name. Then she stands in the airy emptiness of the hall, wringing her gloves, looking upwards.

  I can feel Ginger straining all of this time, fighting against himself not to rush down, to take her in his arms, to walk with her into the sunlit world. I’m reminded of how he was on the train, on the way to the school, alert and expectant. Finally, Rebecca turns to go, and Ginger lets out a brief bark, a sob or a shout, and she turns, her face eager and alive. I’m holding Ginger by the shoulders, Le Strange has him by the hand, and we pull him back further into the shadows. He’s panting, his cheeks bright with tears. The glimmer on Rebecca’s face fades. With a last look up the stairway, she leaves, pulling the doors creakingly shut behind her.

  Ginger doesn’t speak to us for the rest of the day. He sits in one of the tower rooms reading Chekhov and we give him space, hoping that the stories might provide what we could not – solace, a recognition of the truth of his situation. Just before bed, Ginger puts his long slim arms around my neck, pulls me towards him, and I understand what this means, and I squeeze him very tightly. He was my best friend, you know.

  I hear him get up and dress in the darkest hours, feel a soft hand on my forehead and then there is the click of the dormitory door shutting. I imagine him making his way down the driveway, and the courage it must have taken to leave, and the brave, determined look on his scarred face. ‘Thank you, Rebecca,’ I whisper into the night.

  Bingo is the next to go. We are in the tower room which, since Ginger’s departure, has taken on a kind of sacred meaning for us, a place to be together, to remember him. I am reading ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ out loud. Le Strange is lying on the floor, his eyes closed, a distant smile on his listening face. Bingo is perched on the window seat, looking out towards the evening sunlight, which arrows through scattered pink clouds. His face is rendered almost invisible by the brightness of the light, and he sighs every so often, and it is as if he is made of the air, the light. I come to the end of the story, that final hopeful-hopeless passage: ‘And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.’

  All the while I’ve been reading this, Bingo has been leaning further and further towards the sun, out of the window, extending his gangling frame into the insubstantial air. With the final beginning, he issues a last sigh and slips out altogether. I drop the book, rush to the window and look down, but there is no broken body on the lawn below, no sign of him at all. Thin air. Le Strange joins me, puts his arms around me, and we stand there as the light leaches from the sky. On the night wind that comes with darkness, I hear, I think, one of Bingo’s sighs, far up amid the noctilucent clouds.

  I thought, with Ginger and Bingo gone, that I’d be next to leave, but when I come down in the morning, after a night of desperate dreams, the trenches and the town square, the child with the froth-flecked lips, Le Strange is standing in his smoking jacket in the hallway, a pigskin travelling case by his feet.

  ‘It’s time for me to say cheerio, old chap,’ he says. I give him a narrow look. ‘I should have realised, you know, that this was never going to hold together. Typical of me, I’m afraid.’ A little regretful shrug.

  ‘But . . .’ I say, and nothing more.

  ‘It’s been awfully good to know you, old fellow,’ he says. ‘I shall often think of you.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Again he gives a sad little shrug and I take him in my arms, and it seems as if the whole world is concentrated in our embrace, as if we have woken from some terrible dream to feel the firmness of the living world, of each other. Le Strange breaks away, stumbles back, tears in his wintry eyes.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he says, desperately. ‘Goodbye.’ He walks out into the morning, and I am left alone.

  It is December now. Frost patterns the windows, shimmers on the roofs, making icicles of the towers. The weeds that smashed through the cellar door, that vined their way in through windows and shutters have died, leaving their yellow-brown corpses underfoot. The bats control the towers; further down the moths rustle and birds shriek and creak and cackle. Foxes scarper through the corridors, their swift brushes sweeping trails in the dust. There is an owl in the dormitory sitting watch over me as I sleep. Through the broken windows of the library, snow has blown, and now banks up against the armchairs, the mildewed ottoman.

  House agents come by every so often, showing shiny-suited businessmen the potential of the place. ‘A country home of distinction,’ I hear. I keep well out of their way. I feel nothing but pity for these people from the outside, living their lives, storing up more and more memories, each one less and less memorable. I walk the halls with measured, memorial paces, nodding at Ginger’s name on the notice board each time I pass, saluting the window from which Bingo disappeared. It bothers me that I never thanked Le Strange, because I realise that I needed this more than anyone: a retreat, a haunt away from a world that carries on as if the war never happened.

  I have a new dream now, up there in the wind-blasted dormitory, under the gaze of the owl. Every night, Ginger and Bingo and I run through the no-man’s land of Cambrai. It is as if we have wings, though, so light are our footsteps. We spring like antelope over shell-holes, dance out of the way of twanging Mills bombs, we exhale and the force of our breath dissipates the gas-clouds. With a whisper, the bullets from the machine guns pass right through us, falling like rain into the soft mud. The shells that explode slap-bang on top of us cause only the slightest perturbation of the air, throwing up bouquets of earth that are already behind us as we run. We come to a ruined town where we spring over walls, skip through rubble, stride through unpeopled streets. There is a boy in the wide emptiness of the town square, and I lift him laughing onto my shoulders and we go on running, running, running.

  John Saul

  Song of the River

  It was towards the end of April, and London was under cow parsley. As if they were in their twenties, Molly Cadwalader and Susan Thress moved in together. Molly brought her beach chairs, her boxes of pieces of clay pipe and bones; Susan her piano. The piano had an enviable solidity – broad slings and six strong arms were needed to carry it across the threshold – whereas the beach chairs were a portable kind, hollow-strutted, ready to take down to the river; and the expectations Molly Cadwalader brought with her were wisps, a feeling something was vaguely around the corner. There would be someone, man or woman, on the Thames walk, at Hogarth’s house, the TESCO express, on the platform at Barnes Bridge. She would invest energy in reaching this nebulous corner, put the disastrous affair with Hal Hammond behind her. She would join clubs and activities, mingle with the celeb
rities of Chiswick.

  – Or, Susan, we’ll make our own things happen. Find and take in that escaped monkey (the monkey, a tama-something, that was in the Evening Standard).

  – No, we won’t be taking in anything.

  Having put her foot down, Susan swivelled square-on to the piano.

  – We’re so close to the river. I will do river tunes.

  After all the discussions about living together, here they are. Molly looking as if she’s come in from the rain, Susan at her piano.

  She plays a song of the river, a short piece after Beethoven.

  tamarin: its cotton-top hair was a shock of white

  like Hal, thinks Molly

  except that Hal’s had turned white prematurely

  it went past his shoulders

  Rattling to an end (those ageing wires) the piece is followed immediately by a Bach something. Typically – was it typical? Molly was not yet sure – Susan races, and surges, but steadily. Through the window the next aircraft approaches Heathrow. Everything is steady: the aircraft, the way Hal’s hair stayed, the piano, Susan. Molly grows envious of this assuredness at the keys, when the tune tumbles to a close in a rush of notes.