The Penguin Book of English Short Stories

by Christopher Dolley

  Anyway, after about a week the whole pack of them returned by the same train. Mr Calloway travelled Pullman, and the two policemen travelled in the day coach. It was evident that they hadn’t got their extradition order.

  Lucia had left by that time. The car came and went across the bridge. I stood in Mexico and watched her get out at the United States Customs. She wasn’t anything in particular, but she looked beautiful at a distance as she gave me a wave out of the United States and got back into the car. And I suddenly felt sympathy for Mr Calloway, as if there were something over there which you couldn’t find here, and turning round I saw him back on his old beat, with the dog at his heels.

  I said ‘Good afternoon’, as if it had been all along our habit to greet each other. He looked tired and ill and dusty, and I felt sorry for him – to think of the kind of victory he’d been winning, with so much expenditure of cash and care – the prize this dirty and dreary town, the booths of the money-changers, the awful little beauty parlours with their wicker chairs and sofas looking like the reception rooms of brothels, that hot and stuffy garden by the bandstand.

  He replied gloomily ‘Good morning’, and the dog started to sniff at some ordure and he turned and kicked it with fury, with depression, with despair.

  And at that moment a taxi with the two policemen in it passed us on its way to the bridge. They must have seen that kick; perhaps they were cleverer than I had given them credit for, perhaps they were just sentimental about animals, and thought they’d do a good deed, and the rest happened by accident. But the fact remains – those two pillars of the law set about the stealing of Mr Calloway’s dog.

  He watched them go by. Then he said, ‘Why don’t you go across?’

  ‘It’s cheaper here,’ I said.

  ‘I mean just for an evening. Have a meal at that place we can see at night in the sky. Go to the theatre.’

  ‘There isn’t a chance.’

  He said angrily, sucking his gold tooth, ‘Well, anyway, get away from here.’ He stared down the hill and up the other side. He couldn’t see that that street climbing up from the bridge contained only the same money-changers’ booths as this one.

  I said, ‘Why don’t you go?’

  He said evasively, ‘Oh – business.’

  I said, ‘It’s only a question of money. You don’t have to pass by the bridge.’

  He said with faint interest, ‘I don’t talk Spanish.’

  ‘There isn’t a soul here,’ I said, ‘who doesn’t talk English.’

  He looked at me with surprise. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Is that so?’

  It’s as I have said; he’d never tried to talk to anyone, and they respected him too much to talk to him – he was worth a million. I don’t know whether I’m glad or sorry that I told him that. If I hadn’t, he might be there now, sitting by the bandstand having his shoes cleaned – alive and suffering.

  Three days later his dog disappeared. I found him looking for it, calling it softly and shamefacedly between the palms of the garden. He looked embarrassed. He said in a low angry voice, ‘I hate that dog. The beastly mongrel’, and called ‘Rover, Rover, in a voice which didn’t carry five yards. He said, ‘I bred setters once. I’d have shot a dog like that.’ It reminded him, I was right, of Norfolk, and he lived in the memory, and he hated it for its imperfection. He was a man without a family and without friends, and his only enemy was that dog. You couldn’t call the law an enemy; you have to be intimate with an enemy.

  Late that afternoon someone told him they’d seen the dog walking across the bridge. It wasn’t true, of course, but we didn’t know that then – they’d paid a Mexican five pesos to smuggle it across. So all that afternoon and the next Mr Calloway sat in the garden having his shoes cleaned over and over again, and thinking how a dog could just walk across like that, and a human being, an immortal soul, was bound here in the awful routine of the little walk and the unspeakable meals and the aspirin at the botica. That dog was seeing things he couldn’t see – that hateful dog. It made him mad – I think literally mad. You must remember the man had been going on for months. He had a million and he was living on two pounds a week, with nothing to spend his money on. He sat there and brooded on the hideous injustice of it. I think he’d have crossed over one day in any case, but the dog was the last straw.

  Next day when he wasn’t to be seen, I guessed he’d gone across and I went too. The American town is as small as the Mexican. I knew I couldn’t miss him if he was there, and I was still curious. A little sorry for him, but not much.

  I caught sight of him first in the only drug-store, having a Coca-cola, and then once outside a cinema looking at the posters; he had dressed with extreme neatness, as if for a party, but there was no party. On my third time round, I came on the detectives – they were having Coca-colas in the drug-store, and they must have missed Mr Calloway by inches. I went in and sat down at the bar.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘you still about.’ I suddenly felt anxious for Mr Calloway, I didn’t want them to meet.

  One of them said, ‘Where’s Calloway?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s hanging on.’

  ‘But not his dog,’ he said, and laughed. The other looked a little shocked, he didn’t like anyone to talk cynically about a dog. Then they got up – they had a car outside.

  ‘Have another?’ I said.

  ‘No thanks. We’ve got to keep moving.’

  The men bent close and confided to me, ‘Calloway’s on this side.’

  ‘No!’ I said.

  ‘And his dog.’

  ‘He’s looking for it,’ the other said.

  ‘I’m damned if he is,’ I said, and again one of them looked a little shocked, as if I’d insulted the dog.

  I don’t think Mr Calloway was looking for his dog, but his dog certainly found him. There was a sudden hilarious yapping from the car and out plunged the semi-setter and gambolled furiously down the street. One of the detectives – the sentimental one – was into the car before we got to the door and was off after the dog. Near the bottom of the long road to the bridge was Mr Calloway – I do believe he’d come down to look at the Mexican side when he found there was nothing but the drug-store and the cinemas and the paper-shops on the American. He saw the dog coming and yelled at it to go home – ‘home, home, home’, as if they were in Norfolk – it took no notice at all, pelting towards him. Then he saw the police car coming, and ran. After that, everything happened too quickly, but I think the order of events was this – the dog started across the road right in front of the car, and Mr Calloway yelled, at the dog or the car, I don’t know which. Anyway, the detective swerved – he said later, weakly, at the inquiry, that he couldn’t run over a dog, and down went Mr Calloway, in a mess of broken glass and gold rims and silver hair, and blood. The dog was on to him before any of us could reach him, licking and whimpering and licking. I saw Mr Calloway put up his hand, and down it went across the dog’s neck and the whimper rose to a stupid bark of triumph, but Mr Calloway was dead – shock and a weak heart.

  ‘Poor old geezer,’ the detective said, ‘I bet he really loved that dog’, and it’s true that the attitude in which he lay looked more like a caress than a blow. I thought it was meant to be a blow, but the detective may have been right. It all seemed to me a little too touching to be true as the old crook lay there with his arm over the dog’s neck, dead with his million between the money-changers’ huts, but it’s as well to be humble in the face of human nature. He had come across the river for something, and it may, after all, have been the dog he was looking for. It sat there, baying its stupid and mongrel triumph across his body, like a piece of sentimental statuary: the nearest he could get to the fields, the ditches, the horizon of his home. It was comic and it was pitiable, but it wasn’t less comic because the man was dead. Death doesn’t change comedy to tragedy, and if that last gesture was one of affection, I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being’s capacity for self-deception, our basel
ess optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.

  Angus Wilson

  RASPBERRY JAM

  ‘How are your funny friends at Potter’s Farm, Johnnie?’ asked his aunt from London.

  ‘Very well, thank you, Aunt Eva’ said the little boy in the window in a high prim voice. He had been drawing faces on his bare knee and now put down the indelible pencil. The moment that he had been dreading all day had arrived. Now they would probe and probe with their silly questions and the whole story of that dreadful tea party with his old friends would come tumbling out. There would be scenes and abuse and the old ladies would be made to suffer further. This he could not bear, for although he never wanted to see them again and had come, in brooding over the afternoon’s events, almost to hate them, to bring them further misery, to be the means of their disgrace would be worse than any of the horrible things that had already happened. Apart from his fear of what might follow he did not intend to pursue the conversation himself, for he disliked his aunt’s bright patronizing tone. He knew that she felt ill at ease with children and would soon lapse into that embarrassing ‘leg pulling’ manner which some grown ups used. For himself, he did not mind this but if she made silly jokes about the old ladies at Potter’s Farm he would get angry and then Mummy would say all that about his having to learn to take a joke and about his being highly strung and where could he have got it from, not from her.

  But he need not have feared. For though the grown ups continued to speak of the old ladies as ‘Johnnie’s friends’, the topic soon became a general one. Many of the things the others said made the little boy bite his lip, but he was able to go on drawing on his knee with the feigned abstraction of a child among adults.

  ‘My dear,’ said Johnnie’s mother to her sister, ‘you really must meet them. They’re the most wonderful pair of freaks. They live in a great barn of a farmhouse. The inside’s like a museum, full of old junk mixed up with some really lovely things all mouldering to pieces. The family’s been there for hundreds of years and they’re madly proud of it. They won’t let anyone do a single thing for them, although they’re both well over sixty, and of course the result is that the place is in the most frightful mess. It’s really rather ghastly and one oughtn’t to laugh, but if you could see them, my dear. The elder one, Marian, wears a long tweed skirt almost to the ankles, she had a terrible hunting accident or something, and a school blazer. The younger one’s said to have been a beauty, but she’s really rather sinister now, inches thick in enamel and rouge and dressed in all colours of the rainbow, with dyed red hair which is constantly falling down. Of course, Johnnie’s made tremendous friends with them and I must say they’ve been immensely kind to him, but what Harry will say when he comes back from Germany, I can’t think. As it is, he’s always complaining that the child is too much with women and has no friends of his own age.’

  ‘I don’t honestly think you need worry about that, Grace’ said her brother Jim, assuming the attitude of the sole male in the company, for of the masculinity of old Mr Codrington their guest he instinctively made little. ‘Harry ought to be very pleased with the way old Miss Marian’s encouraged Johnnie’s cricket and riding; it’s pretty uphill work, too. Johnnie’s not exactly a Don Bradman or a Gordon Richards, are you, old man? I like the old girl, personally. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about the Bolsheviks, but she’s stood up to those damned council people about the drainage like a good ’un; she does no end for the village people as well and says very little about it.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of “doing good to the village” very much’ said Eva ‘it usually means patronage and disappointed old maids meddling in other people’s affairs. It’s only in villages like this that people can go on serving out sermons with gifts of soup.’

  ‘Curiously enough, Eva old dear,’ Jim said, for he believed in being rude to his progressive sister, ‘in this particular case you happen to be wrong. Miss Swindale is extremely broadminded. You remember, Grace,’ he said, addressing his other sister ‘what she said about giving money to old Cooper, when the rector protested it would only go on drink – “You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get there.” Serve him damn well right for interfering too.’

  ‘Well, Jim darling’ said Grace ‘I must say she could hardly have the nerve to object to drink – the poor old thing has the most dreadful bouts herself. Sometimes when I can’t get gin from the grocer’s it makes me absolutely livid to think of all that secret drinking and they say it only makes her more and more gloomy. All the same I suppose I should drink if I had a sister like Dolly. It must be horrifying when one’s family-proud like she is to have such a skeleton in the cupboard. I’m sure there’s going to be the most awful trouble in the village about Dolly before she’s finished. You’ve heard the squalid story about young Tony Calkett, haven’t you? My dear, he went round there to fix the lights and apparently Dolly invited him up to her bedroom to have a cherry brandy of all things and made the most unfortunate proposals. Of course I know she’s been very lonely and it’s all a ghastly tragedy really, but Mrs Calkett’s a terrible silly little woman and a very jealous mother and she won’t see it that way at all. The awful thing is that both the Miss Swindales give me the creeps rather. I have a dreadful feeling when I’m with them that I don’t know who’s the keeper and who’s the lunatic. In fact, Eva my dear, they’re both really rather horrors and I suppose I ought never to let Johnnie go near them.’

  ‘I think you have no cause for alarm, Mrs Allingham’ put in old Mr Codrington in a purring voice. He had been waiting for some time to take the floor, and now that he had got it he did not intend to relinquish it. Had it not been for the small range of village society he would not have been a visitor at Mrs Allingham’s, for, as he frequently remarked, if there was one thing he deplored more than her vulgarity it was her loquacity. ‘No one delights in scandal more than I do, but it is always a little distorted, a trifle exagéré, indeed where would be its charm, if it were not so! No doubt Miss Marian has her solaces, but she remains a noble-hearted woman. No doubt Miss Dolly is often a trifly naughty’ he dwelt on this word caressingly ‘but she really only uses the privilege of one, who has been that rare thing, a beautiful woman. As for Tony Calkett it is really time that that young man ceased to be so unnecessarily virginal. If my calculations are correct, and I have every reason to think they are, he must be twenty-two, an age at which modesty should have been put behind one long since. No, dear Mrs Allingham, you should rejoice that Johnnie has been given the friendship of two women who can still, in this vulgar age, be honoured with a name that, for all that it has been cheapened and degraded, one is still proud to bestow – the name of a lady.’ Mr Codrington threw his head back and stared round the room as though defying anyone to deny him his own right to this name. ‘Miss Marian will encourage him in the manlier virtues, Miss Dolly in the arts. Her own water colours, though perhaps lacking in strength, are not to be despised. She has a fine sense of colour, though I could wish that she was a little less bold with it in her costume. Nevertheless with that red-gold hair there is something splendid about her appearance, something especially wistful to an old man like myself. Those peacock blue linen gowns take me back through Conder’s fans and Whistler’s rooms to Rossetti’s Mona Vanna. Unfortunately as she gets older the linen is not overclean. We are given a Mona Vanna with the collected dust of age, but surely,’ he added with a little cackle ‘it is dirt that lends patina to a picture. It is interesting that you should say you are uncertain which of the two sisters is a trifle peculiar, because, in point of fact, both have been away, as they used to phrase it in the servants’ hall of my youth. Strange,’ he mused, ‘that one’s knowledge of the servants’ hall should always belong to the period of one’s infancy, be, as it were, eternally outmoded. I have no conception of how they may speak of an asylum in the servants’ hall of today. No doubt Johnnie could tell us. But, of course, I forget that social pr
ogress has removed the servants’ hall from the ken of all but the most privileged children. I wonder now whether that is a loss or a blessing in disguise.’

  ‘A blessing without any doubt at all’ said Aunt Eva, irrepressible in the cause of Advance. ‘Think of all the appalling inhibitions we acquired from servants’ chatter. I had an old nurse who was always talking about ghosts and dead bodies and curses on the family in a way that must have set up terrible phobias in me. I still have those ugly, morbid nightmares about spiders’ she said, turning to Grace.

  ‘I refuse’ said Mr Codrington in a voice of great contempt, for he was greatly displeased at the interruption, ‘to believe that any dream of yours could be ugly; morbid, perhaps, but with a sense of drama and artistry that would befit the dreamer. I confess that if I have inhibitions, and I trust I have many, I cling to them. I should not wish to give way unreservedly to what is so unattractively called the libido, it suggests a state of affairs in which beach pyjamas are worn and jitterbugging is compulsory. No, let us retain the fantasies, the imaginative games of childhood, even at the expense of a little fear, for they are the true magnificence of the springtime of life.’

  ‘Darling Mr Codrington’ cried Grace ‘I do pray and hope you’re right. It’s exactly what I keep on telling myself about Johnnie, but I really don’t know. Johnnie, darling, run upstairs and fetch Mummy’s bag.’ But his mother need not have been so solicitous about Johnnie’s overhearing what she had to say, for the child had already left the room. ‘There you are, Eva,’ she said ‘he’s the strangest child. He slips away without so much as a word. I must say he’s very good at amusing himself, but I very much wonder if all the funny games he plays aren’t very bad for him. He’s certainly been very peculiar lately, strange silences and sudden tears, and, my dear, the awful nightmares he has! About a fortnight ago, after he’d been at tea with the Miss Swindales, I don’t know whether it was something he’d eaten there, but he made the most awful sobbing noise in the night. Sometimes I think it’s just temper, like Harry. The other day at tea I only offered him some jam, my best home-made raspberry too, and he just screamed at me.’