The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

by Philip Hensher

  After supper her father asked the dreaded question, which her mother answered for her.

  ‘No, she hasn’t written yet.’

  ‘She’s got to do as she’s told, do you hear?’

  ‘Yes, the girl knows that.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t she done it?’

  Mrs Troubridge explained.

  ‘She says she doesn’t know what to say.’

  George Troubridge took this in slowly. His silence continued to listen to the words after they were spoken; it also allowed the difficulty, though without acknowledging that he was himself beaten by it. He was sitting at his ease in the cosy lamp-lit room, but his hard limbs seemed to be so stiff-shaped as to be beyond the comfortable ministrations of the arm-chair. Two of the elder children were playing cards at the table. Their Aunt Isabel, whose status in the house as Mrs Troubridge’s sister gave her the privilege of doing twice as much work as any maid, came and sat down with her mending. But because the younger children were in bed, and the indoor man gone to his quarters, and the hour come when it was unlikely that George Troubridge would be interrupted again that night, a suitable degree of privacy seemed to have been achieved.

  ‘She doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t she?’ began Mr Troubridge. ‘Oh, so she doesn’t know what to say,’ he repeated, gaining time. Sudden inspiration came to him. ‘Well, then, let her tell him he’s got her into trouble and he’ll have to do something about it. Let her tell him that.’

  ‘Yes, and she must tell him a man might be the highest in the land, but it doesn’t excuse him,’ said his wife, catching the inspiration herself. ‘And she must say he’ll never have any rest to his mind nor enjoy any of his blessings unless he does something for her and the child,’ she proclaimed doubtfully.

  Each time they stopped speaking Jessie made a faint movement, not a reply, but something more dutiful than absolute stillness would have been. Her downcast eyes and helpless mouth just stirred – a faint, dumb, despairing signal of obedience.

  ‘So you don’t know what to say, don’t you?’ said George Troubridge once more. ‘Well, then tell him that what with dear labour and cheap corn, and what with the taxes, and the market flooded with imports, you might say I’m a ruined man. You tell him that. And the harder I work, the more money I lose, by the look of it,’ he grumbled. ‘And so it’s going on, by what I can see. And it isn’t likely I’m going to pay for his wrong-doing. That’s what you’ve got to tell him.’

  ‘And tell him,’ said Mrs Troubridge, ‘that you’ve had a bad time with it so far, shocking bad; and that you’ve been as good as useless in the house for some time past.’

  ‘And you must say,’ came from Mrs Troubridge’s hard-worked sister, startling them all with unexpectedness, ‘that a man should do everything in his power to atone for such wickedness – yes, everything, and then he could never do enough.’ Her face was flushed and her eyes bright with indignation.

  This outburst closed the subject; anything added at that moment would have been an anticlimax, and no further material for Jessie’s letter was supplied to her that night.

  But when she woke up the next morning she knew that the letter had come closer, and she did not see how she could avoid writing it that day.

  That night her father asked:

  ‘Has she written to him?’

  ‘No, she hasn’t exactly written yet,’ replied her mother.

  ‘Then why hasn’t she?’

  ‘Well, she didn’t really know if that’s all she has to say.’

  He reflected.

  ‘She can tell him I’ve always been a fair man myself, and I look for fair treatment from others. But there’s no fairness in how this is! None at all! And she’s got to let him know it.’

  Another day went by and when evening came the sight of her immediately reminded her father.

  ‘Has she done what she’s told?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ said her mother, ‘but now that she knows what she’s got to say, she’ll be writing. I was just wondering whether that’s all, or whether there’s anything else she ought to add.’

  They meditated, with the slightly pleasant consciousness that the execution of this disagreeable duty did at any rate provide the opportunity to distinguish oneself by the value of the ideas one contributed to the letter. It was to Mrs Troubridge that the honours fell this evening.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘that she might also put that a girl’s fair name is her all, and that once she’s lost that she’s lost everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Troubridge, ‘she can put a piece about that if she likes.’

  Jessie went out the next day to wander in her father’s big fields. Today only the early morning was misty, and the dark-gold sun of autumn shone powerfully, scattering the vapours. The fields were of an unusual size; it would seem at first as if this were a wide undivided sweep of tilled land, until far away could be seen the hedges that squared-in the vast spaces and made them, after all, into fields – but such fields as required a mammoth sowing, and made large ricks and filled great barns. Passing into one of these fields with her tired distressed walk, Jessie could hardly see its limits. For one of those great fields was large enough to contain rises and falls, to hold not only the deeply coloured sunshine close around her, but also the mists of autumn in its distant parts. When afternoon came she and the red setting sun stood in the same field, at either end of it.

  In the grandeur and spaciousness of the day her thoughts passed beyond her immediate preoccupation, and opened her mind to memories and to faint thrills of the future. Earlier in the day she had thought she would have done best to stay at home in the arm-chair. But as she wandered her weariness passed away for once. She entered a field that from the gate was nothing but monotonous stubble from end to end; she came out of the same field with her hands full of bright yellow and white and purple wild-flowers gathered from the profusion lurking in that colourless stubble. She passed into a little wood, and came out of it with her face bright, leaving it lingeringly as if she had never wished to leave it again. And then when she could delay no longer she turned her footsteps toward home.

  Going indoors she saw the sheet of letter-paper lying where it had waited so long for her. With a leap of her heart she knew she was to write to him, and she sat at the table and took up the pen.

  Do not be angry at getting these few lines from one you have perhaps forgotten now you are so far away. It is because I had such a happy day, and it seems as if I am speaking to you now. Excuse me for telling you what a joyful thing happened today. I passed through Hayter’s copse where I lost the bracelet you gave me and where we searched so long. I’ve spent many an hour looking for it since then, but after all these months I found it today at my feet in some moss.

  I went also by the lane where you sprained your ankle, and how I wish with all my heart you had never had that pain to bear and need never know what it is to suffer pain. If these few lines could bring you a hundredth part of what I wish you would be happy for always.

  JESSIE

  That evening her father, when he came indoors and settled himself in his arm-chair, said:

  ‘Has the girl written that letter yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother, ‘she’s written.’

  ‘She has written? Oh well, never mind. Only I was going to tell her another bit to put in if she hadn’t written yet. Here I’ve been to market today with the pigs and the chicken and had a terrible bad trade; they didn’t make much above what they cost me to rear. How’s that going to pay for extra expenses? And what’s the good of me going out to earn sixpence if she stops at home and spends a shilling! Just let her tell him that!’

  ‘Yes, but the letter’s written,’ his wife reminded him.

  ‘So it is. Well, then, let Tom slip along to the cross-roads and catch the postman with it.’

  A. E. Coppard

  Olive and Camilla

  They had lived and travelled together for twenty years, and this is a part of
their history: not much, but all that matters. Ever since reaching marriageable age they had been together, and so neither had married, though Olive had had her two or three occasions of perilous inducement. Being women, they were critical of each other, inseparably critical; being spinsters, they were huffy, tender, sullen, and demure and had quarrelled with each other ten thousand times in a hundred different places during their ‘wanderings up and down Europe’. That was the phrase Camilla used in relating their maidenly Odyssey, which had comprised a multitude of sojourns in the pensions of Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and France. They quarrelled in Naples and repented in Rome; exploded in anger at Arles, were embittered at Interlaken, parted for ever at Lake Garda, Taormina, and Bruges; but running water never fouls, they had never really been apart, not anywhere. Olive was like that, and so was her friend; such natures could nowise be changed. Camilla Hobbs, slight and prim, had a tiny tinkling mind that tinkled all day long; she was all things to little nothings. The other, Olive Sharples, the portly one, had a mind like a cuckoo-clock; something came out and cried ‘Cuckoo’ now and again, quite sharply, and was done with it. They were moulded thus, one supposes, by the hand of Providence; it could be neither evaded nor altered, it could not even be mitigated, for in Camilla’s prim mind and manner there was a prim deprecation of Olive’s boorish nature, and for her part Olive resented Camilla’s assumption of a superior disposition. Saving a precious month or two in Olive’s favour they were both now of a sad age, an age when the path of years slopes downwards to a yawning inexplicable gulf.

  ‘Just fancy!’ Camilla said on her forty-fifth birthday – they were at Chamonix then – ‘we are ninety between us!’

  Olive glowered at her friend, though a couple of months really is nothing. ‘When I am fifty,’ she declared, ‘I shall kill myself.’

  ‘But why?’ Camilla was so interested.

  ‘God, I don’t know!’ returned Olive.

  Camilla brightly brooded for a few moments. ‘You’ll find it very hard to commit suicide; it’s not easy, you know, not at all. I’ve heard time and time again that it’s most difficult…’

  ‘Pooh!’ snorted Olive.

  ‘But I tell you! I tell you I knew a cook at Leamington who swallowed ground glass in her porridge, pounds and pounds, and nothing came of it.’

  ‘Pooh!’ Olive was contemptuous. ‘Never say die.’

  ‘Well, that’s just what people say who can’t do it!’

  The stream of their companionship was far from being a rill of peaceful water, but it flowed, more and more like a cataract it flowed, and was like to flow on as it had for those twenty years. Otherwise they were friendless! Olive had had enough money to do as she modestly liked, for though she was impulsive her desires were frugal, but Camilla had had nothing except a grandmother. In the beginning of their friendship Olive had carried the penurious Camilla off to Paris, where they mildly studied art and ardently pursued the practice of water-colour painting. Olive, it might be said, transacted doorways and alleys, very shadowy and grim, but otherwise quite nice; and Camilla did streams with bending willow and cow on bank, really sweet. In a year or two Camilla’s grandmother died of dropsy and left her a fortune, much larger than Olive’s, in bank stock, insurance stock, distillery, coal – oh, a mass of money! And when something tragical happened to half of Olive’s property – it was in salt shares or jute shares, such unstable friable material – it became the little fluttering Camilla’s joy to play the fairy godmother in her turn. So there they were in a bondage less sentimental than appeared, but more sentimental than was known.

  They returned to England for George V’s coronation. In the train from Chamonix a siphon of soda-water that Camilla imported into the carriage – it was an inexplicable thing, that bottle of soda-water, as Olive said after the catastrophe: God alone knew why she had bought it – Camilla’s siphon, what with the jolting of the train and its own gasobility, burst on the rack. Just burst! A handsome young Frenchwoman travelling in their compartment was almost convulsed with mirth, but Olive, sitting just below the bottle, was drenched, she declared, to the midriff. Camilla lightly deprecated the coarseness of the expression. How could she help it if a bottle took it into its head to burst like that! In abrupt savage tones Olive merely repeated that she was soaked to the midriff, and to Camilla’s horror she began to divest herself of some of her clothing. Camilla rushed to the windows, pulled down the blinds, and locked the corridor door. The young Frenchwoman sat smiling while Olive removed her corsets and her wetted linen; Camilla rummaged so feverishly in Olive’s suitcase that the compartment began to look as if arranged for a jumble sale; there were garments and furbelows strewn everywhere. But at last Olive completed her toilet, the train stopped at a station, the young Frenchwoman got out. Later in the day, when they were nearing Paris, Olive’s corsets could not be found.

  ‘What did you do with them?’ Olive asked Camilla.

  ‘But I don’t think I touched them, Olive. After you took them off I did not see them again. Where do you think you put them? Can’t you remember?’

  She helped Olive unpack the suitcase, but the stays were not there. And she helped Olive to repack.

  ‘What am I to do?’ asked Olive.

  Camilla firmly declared that the young Frenchwoman who had travelled with them in the morning must have stolen them.

  ‘What for?’ asked Olive.

  ‘Well, what do people steal things for?’ There was an air of pellucid reason in Camilla’s question, but Olive was scornful.

  ‘Corsets!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I knew a cripple once,’ declared Olive, ‘who stole an ear-trumpet.’

  ‘That French girl wasn’t a cripple.’

  ‘No,’ said Camilla, ‘but she was married – at least, she wore a wedding ring. She looked as deep as the sea. I am positive she was up to no good.’

  ‘Bosh!’ said Olive. ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, you should not throw your things about as you do.’

  ‘Soda-water,’ snapped Olive, with ferocious dignity, ‘is no place for a railway carriage.’

  ‘You mean—?’ asked Camilla with the darling sweetness of a maid of twenty.

  ‘I mean just what I say.’

  ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ purred the triumphant one; and she repeated Olive’s topsy-turvy phrase. ‘Ha, ha, that’s what you said.’

  ‘I did not! Camilla, why are you such a liar? You know it annoys me.’

  ‘But I tell you, Olive—’

  ‘I did not! It’s absurd. You’re a fool.’

  Well, they got to England and in a few days it began to appear to them as the most lovely country they had ever seen. It was not only that, it was their homeland. Why have we stayed away so long? Why did we not come back before? It was so marvellously much better than anything else in the world, they were sure of that. So much better, too, than their youthful recollection of it, so much improved; and the cleanness! Why did we never come back? Why have we stayed away so long? They did not know; it was astonishing to find your homeland so lovely. Both felt that they could not bear to leave England again; they would settle down and build a house, it was time; their joint age was ninety! But, alas, it was difficult, it was impossible, to dovetail their idea of a house into one agreeable abode.

  ‘I want,’ said Olive Sharples, ‘just an English country cottage with a few conveniences. That’s all I can afford and all I want.’

  So she bought an acre of land at the foot of a green hill in the Chilterns and gave orders for the erection of the house of her dreams. Truly it was a charming spot, pasture and park and glebe and spinney and stream, deliciously remote, quite half a mile from any village, and only to be reached by a mere lane. No sooner had her friend made this decision than Camilla too bought land there, half a dozen acres adjoining Olive’s, and began to build the house of her dreams, a roomy house with a loggia and a balcony, planting her land with fruit trees. The two houses were built close together, by the
same men, and Camilla could call out greetings to Olive from her bedroom window before Olive was up in the morning, and Olive could hear her – though she did not always reply. Had Olive suffered herself to peer steadily into her secret thoughts in order to discover her present feeling about Camilla, she would have been perplexed; she might even have been ashamed, but for the comfort of old acquaintance such telescopic introspection was denied her. The new cottage brought her felicity, halcyon days; even her bedroom contented her, so small and clean and bare it was. Beyond bed, washing-stand, mirror, and rug there was almost nothing, and yet she felt that if she were not exceedingly careful she would break something. The ceiling was virgin white, the walls the colour of butter, the floor the colour of chocolate. The grate had never had a fire in it; not a shovelful of ashes had ever been taken from it, and, please God – so it seemed to indicate – never would be. But the bed was soft and reposeful. Oh, heavenly sleep!

  The two friends dwelt thus in isolation; there they were, perhaps this was happiness. The isolation was tempered by the usual rural society, a squire who drank, a magistrate who was mad, and a lime-burner whose daughters had been to college and swore like seamen. There was the agreeable Mr Kippax, a retired fellmonger, in whom Camilla divined a desire to wed somebody – Olive perhaps. He was sixty and played on the violoncello. Often Olive accompanied him on Camilla’s grand piano. Crump, crump, he would go; and primp, primp, Olive would reply. He was a serious man, and once when they were alone he asked Olive why she was always so sad.

  ‘I don’t know. Am I?’

  ‘Surely,’ he said, grinning, running his fingers through his long grey hair. ‘Why are you?’

  And Olive thought and thought. ‘I suppose I want impossible things.’

  ‘Such as—?’ he interrogated.

  ‘I do not know. I only know that I shall never find them.’

  Then there were the vicarage people, a young vicar with a passionate complexion who had once been an actor and was now something of an invalid, having had a number of his ribs removed for some unpleasant purpose; charming Mrs Vicar and a tiny baby. Oh, and Mrs Lassiter, the wife of a sea captain far away on the seas; yet she was content, and so by inference was the sea captain, for he never came home. There was a dearth of colour in her cheeks, it had crowded into her lips, her hair, her eyes. So young, so beautiful, so trite, there was a fragrant imbecility about her.