The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  Pliny crying! At first I took this to be one of Isabel’s fancies. Then I thought of tall, clumsy, servant-like Pliny, expert at sales with his long-nosed face pouring out water like a pump, repentant, remorseful, agonised like an animal, to a pretty girl. Why? Just because she had sold something? Isabel loved to sell things. He must have had some other reason. I remembered Castle of Westbury’s story. What had he done to the girl? Only a cruel man could have gone in for such an orgy of self-love. He had the long face on which tears would be a blackmail. He would be like a horse crying because it had lost a race.

  Yet those tears were memorable to Isabel and she so firmly called him ‘Mr Pliny’. In bed, did she still call him ‘Mr Pliny’? I have often thought since that she did; it would have given her a power – perhaps cowed him.

  At night the cold white-washed store-room was silent under the light of its single bulb and the place was mostly in shadow, only the tops of stacked furniture stood out in the yellow light, some of them like buildings. The foundations of the stacks were tables or chests, desks on which chairs or small cabinets were piled. We walked down alleys between the stacks. It was like walking through a dead, silent city, abandoned by everyone who once lived there. There was the sour smell of upholstery; in one part there was a sort of plaza where two large dining tables stood with their chairs set around and a pile of dessert plates on them. Isabel was walking confidently. She stopped by a dressing-table with a mirror on it next to a group of wardrobes and turning round to face it, she said proudly:

  ‘Mr Pliny gave it all to me. And the shop.’

  ‘All of this?’

  ‘When he stopped crying,’ she said.

  And then she turned about and we faced the wardrobes. There were six or seven, one in rosewood and an ugly yellow one and they were so arranged here that they made a sort of alcove or room. The wardrobe at the corner of the alley was very heavy and leaned so that its doors were open in a manner of such empty hopelessness, showing its empty shelves, that it made me uneasy. Someone might have just taken his clothes from it in a hurry, perhaps that very minute, and gone off. He might be watching us. It was the wardrobe with the squeaking door which I had seen the customer open while the woman whom I had thought to be Mrs Pliny stood by. Each piece of furniture seemed to watch – even the small things, like an umbrella stand or a tray left on a table. Isabel walked into the alcove and there was a greeny-grey sofa with a screwed up paper bag of toffees on it and on the floor beside it I saw, of all things, the lancer’s helmet and the side drum and the bugle. The yellow light scarcely lit this corner.

  ‘There’s your drum,’ I said.

  ‘This is my house,’ she said, gaily now. ‘Do you like it? When Mr Pliny is away I come here in case August’s men come …’

  She looked at me doubtfully when she mentioned that name again.

  ‘And you beat the drum to drive them away?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said stoutly.

  I could not make out whether she was playing the artless child or not, yet she was a woman of twenty-five at least. I was bewildered.

  ‘You are frightened here on your own, aren’t you?’

  ‘No I am not. It’s nice.’

  Then she said very firmly:

  ‘You will come here on Monday and give me the box back?’

  I said: ‘I will if you’ll let me kiss you. I love you, Isabel.’

  ‘Mr Pliny loves me too,’ she said.

  ‘Isab …’ I said. That did move her.

  I put my arm round her waist and she let me draw her to me. It was strange to hold her because I could feel her ribs, but her body was so limp and feeble that, loving her as I did, I was shocked and pulled her tightly against me. She turned her head weakly so that I could only kiss her cheek and see only one of her eyes and I could not make out whether she was enticing me, simply curious about my embrace or drooping in it without heart.

  ‘You are one of August’s men,’ she said getting away from me. ‘He used to try and get into my bed. After that I locked my door.’

  ‘Isabel,’ I said. ‘I am in love with you. I think you love me. Why did you marry a horrible old man like Pliny?’

  ‘Mr Pliny is not horrible,’ she said. ‘I love him. He never comes to my room.’

  ‘Then he doesn’t love you,’ I said. ‘Leaving you locked up here. And you don’t love him.’

  She listened in the manner of someone wanting to please, waiting for me to stop.

  ‘He is not a real husband, a real lover,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ she said proudly. ‘He takes my clothes off before I go to bed. He likes to look at me. I am the most precious thing he has.’

  ‘That isn’t love, Isabel,’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ she said with warmth. ‘You don’t love me. You cheated me. Mr Pliny said so. And you don’t want to look at me. You don’t think I’m precious.’

  I went to take her in my arms again and held her.

  ‘I love you. I want you. You are beautiful. I didn’t cheat you. Pliny is cheating you, not me,’ I said. ‘He is not with his sister. He’s in bed with a woman in Brixton. I saw them in a pub. Everyone knows it.’

  ‘No he is not. I know he is not. He doesn’t like it. He promised his mother,’ she said.

  The voice in which she said this was not her playful voice; the girl vanished and a woman had taken her place and not a distressed woman, not a contemptuous or a disappointed one.

  ‘He worships me,’ she said and in the squalid store of dead junk she seemed to be illumined by the simple knowledge of her own value and looked at my love as if it were nothing at all.

  I looked at the sofa and was so mad that I thought of grabbing her and pulling her down there. What made me hesitate was the crumpled bag of toffees on it. I was as nonplussed and, perhaps, as impotent as Pliny must have been. In that moment of hesitation she picked up her bugle and standing in the aisle, she blew it hard, her cheeks going out full and the noise and echoes seemed to make the shadows jump. I have never heard a bugle call that scared me so much. It killed my desire.

  ‘I told you not to come in,’ she said. ‘Go away.’

  And she walked into the aisle between the furniture, swinging her key to the door.

  ‘Come back,’ I said as I followed her.

  I saw her face in the dressing-table mirror we had passed before, then I saw my own face, red and sweating on the upper lip and my mouth helplessly open. And then in the mirror I saw another face following mine – Pliny’s. Pliny must have seen me in the pub.

  In that oblong frame of mahogany with its line of yellow inlay, Pliny’s head looked winged by his ears and he was coming at me, his head down, his mouth with its yellowing teeth open under the moustache and his eyes stained in the bad light. He looked like an animal. The mirror concentrated him and before I could do more than half turn he had jumped in a clumsy way at me and jammed one of my shoulders against a tall-boy.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he shouted.

  The shouts echoed over the store.

  ‘I warned you. I’ll get the police on you. You leave my wife alone. Get out. You thought you’d get her on her own and swindle her again.’

  I hated to touch a white-haired man but, in pain, I shoved him back hard. We were, as I have said, close to the wardrobe and he staggered back so far that he hit the shelves and the door swung towards him so that he was half out of my sight for a second. I kicked the door hard with my left foot and it swung to and hit him in the face. He jumped out with blood on his nose. But I had had time to topple the pile of little cane chairs into the alleyway between us. Isabel saw this and ran round the block of furniture and reached him and when I saw her she was standing with the bugle raised like a weapon in her hand to defend the old man from me. He was wiping his face. She looked triumphant.

  ‘Don’t you touch Mr Pliny,’ she shouted at me. ‘He’s ill.’

  He was ill. He staggered. I pushed my way through the fallen chairs and I picked up one an
d said: ‘Pliny, sit down on this.’ Pliny with the bleeding face glared and she forced him to sit down. He was panting. And then a new voice joined us; the tobacconist came down the alley.

  ‘I heard the bugle,’ he said. ‘Anything wrong? Oh Gawd, look at his face. What happened, Pliny? Mrs Pliny, you all right?’ And then he saw me. All the native shadiness of the London streets, all the gossip of the neighbourhood came into his face.

  ‘I said to my wife,’ he said, ‘something’s wrong at Pliny’s.’

  ‘I came to offer Mr Pliny a piece of Dresden,’ I said, ‘but he was out at Brixton seeing his sister, his wife said. He came back and thought I’d broken in and hit himself on the wardrobe.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to leave Mrs Pliny alone with all this valuable stock, Mr Pliny. Saturday night too,’ the tobacconist said.

  Tears had started rolling down Pliny’s cheeks very suddenly when I mentioned Brixton and he looked at me and the tobacconist in panic.

  ‘I’m not interested in Dresden,’ he managed to say.

  Isabel dabbed his face and sent the tobacconist for a glass of water.

  ‘No, dear, you’re not,’ said Isabel.

  And to me she said: ‘We’re not interested.’

  That was the end. I found myself walking in the street. How unreal people looked in the sodium light.

  JEAN RHYS

  Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers

  As the two girls were walking up yellow-hot Market Street, Irene nudged her sister and said: ‘Look at her!’ They were not far from the market, they could still smell the fish.

  When Rosalie turned her head the few white women she saw carried parasols. The black women were barefooted, wore gaily striped turbans and highwaisted dresses. It was still the nineteenth century, November 1899.

  ‘There she goes,’ said Irene.

  And there was Mrs Menzies, riding up to her house on the Morne for a cool weekend.

  ‘Good morning,’ Rosalie said, but Mrs Menzies did not answer. She rode past, clip-clop, clip-clop, in her thick, dark riding habit brought from England ten years before, balancing a large dripping parcel wrapped in flannel on her knee.

  ‘It’s ice. She wants her drinks cold,’ said Rosalie.

  ‘Why can’t she have it sent up like everybody else? The black people laugh at her. She ought to be ashamed of herself.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Rosalie said obstinately.

  ‘Oh, you,’ Irene jeered. ‘You like crazy people. You like Jimmy Longa and you like old maman Menzies. You liked Ramage, nasty beastly horrible Ramage.’

  Rosalie said: ‘You cried about him yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday doesn’t count. Mother says we were all hysterical yesterday.’

  By this time they were nearly home so Rosalie said nothing. But she put her tongue out as they went up the steps into the long, cool gallery.

  Their father, Dr Cox, was sitting in an armchair with a three-legged table by his side.

  On the table were his pipe, his tin of tobacco and his glasses. Also The Times weekly edition, the Cornhill Magazine, the Lancet and a West Indian newspaper, the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette.

  He was not to be spoken to, as they saw at once though one was only eleven and the other nine.

  ‘Dead as a door nail,’ he muttered as they went past him into the next room so comfortably full of rocking-chairs, a mahogany table, palm leaf fans, a tigerskin rug, family photographs, views of Bettws-y-Coed and a large picture of wounded soldiers in the snow, Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow.

  The doctor had not noticed his daughters, for he too was thinking about Mr Ramage. He had liked the man, stuck up for him, laughed off his obvious eccentricities, denied point blank that he was certifiable. All wrong. Ramage, probably a lunatic, was now dead as a door nail. Nothing to be done.

  Ramage had first arrived in the island two years before, a handsome man in tropical kit, white suit, red cummerbund, solar topee. After he grew tired of being followed about by an admiring crowd of little Negro boys he stopped wearing the red sash and the solar topee but he clung to his white suits though most of the men wore dark trousers even when the temperature was ninety in the shade.

  Miss Lambton, who had been a fellow passenger from Barbados, reported that he was certainly a gentleman and also a king among men when it came to looks. But he was very unsociable. He ignored all invitations to dances, tennis parties and moonlight picnics. He never went to church and was not to be seen at the club. He seemed to like Dr Cox, however, and dined with him one evening. And Rosalie, then aged seven, fell in love.

  After dinner, though the children were not supposed to talk much when guests were there, and were usually not allowed downstairs at all, she edged up to him and said: ‘Sing something.’ (People who came to dinner often sang afterwards, as she well knew.)

  ‘I can’t sing,’ said Ramage.

  ‘Yes you can.’ Her mother’s disapproving expression made her insist the more. ‘You can. You can.’

  He laughed and hoisted her on to his knee. With her head against his chest she listened while he rumbled gently: ‘Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.’

  Then the gun at the fort fired for nine o’clock and the girls, smug in their stiff white dresses, had to say good night nicely and go upstairs to bed.

  After a perfunctory rubber of whist with a dummy, Mrs Cox also departed. Over his whisky and soda Ramage explained that he’d come to the island with the intention of buying an estate. ‘Small, and as remote as possible.’

  ‘That won’t be difficult here.’

  ‘So I heard,’ said Ramage.

  ‘Tried any of the other islands?’

  ‘I went to Barbados first.’

  ‘Little England,’ the doctor said. ‘Well?’

  ‘I was told that there were several places going along this new Imperial Road you’ve got here.’

  ‘Won’t last,’ Dr Cox said. ‘Nothing lasts in this island. Nothing will come of it. You’ll see.’

  Ramage looked puzzled.

  ‘It’s all a matter of what you want the place for,’ the doctor said without explaining himself. ‘Are you after a good interest on your capital or what?’

  ‘Peace,’ Ramage said. ‘Peace, that’s what I’m after.’

  ‘You’ll have to pay for that,’ the doctor said.

  ‘What’s the price?’ said Ramage, smiling. He put one leg over the other. His bare ankle was hairy and thin, his hands long and slender for such a big man.

  ‘You’ll be very much alone.’

  ‘That will suit me,’ Ramage said.

  ‘And if you’re far along the road, you’ll have to cut the trees down, burn the stumps and start from scratch.’

  ‘Isn’t there a half-way house?’ Ramage said.

  The doctor answered rather vaguely: ‘You might be able to get hold of one of the older places.’

  He was thinking of young Errington, of young Kellaway, who had both bought estates along the Imperial Road and worked hard. But they had given up after a year or two, sold their land cheap and gone back to England. They could not stand the loneliness and melancholy of the forest.

  A fortnight afterwards Miss Lambton told Mrs Cox that Mr Ramage had bought Spanish Castle, the last but one of the older properties. It was beautiful but not prosperous – some said bad luck, others bad management. His nearest neighbour was Mr Eliot, who owned Malgré Tout. Now called Twickenham.

  For several months after this Ramage disappeared and one afternoon at croquet Mrs Cox asked Miss Lambton if she had any news of him.

  ‘A strange man,’ she said, ‘very reserved.’

  ‘Not so reserved as all that,’ said Miss Lambton. ‘He got married several weeks ago. He told me that he didn’t want it talked about.’

  ‘No!’ said Mrs Cox. ‘Who to?’

  Then it all came out. Ramage had married a coloured girl who called herself Isla Harrison, though she had no right to the name of Harrison. Her
mother was dead and she’d been brought up by her godmother, old Miss Myra, according to local custom. Miss Myra kept a sweet shop in Bay Street and Isla was very well known in the town – too well known.

  ‘He took her to Trinidad,’ said Miss Lambton mournfully, ‘and when they came back they were married. They went down to Spanish Castle and I’ve heard nothing about them since.’

  ‘It’s not as though she was a nice coloured girl,’ everybody said.

  So the Ramages were lost to white society. Lost to everyone but Dr Cox. Spanish Castle estate was in a district which he visited every month, and one afternoon as he was driving past he saw Ramage standing near his letter box which was nailed to a tree visible from the road. He waved. Ramage waved back and beckoned.

  While they were drinking punch on the veranda, Mrs Ramage came in. She was dressed up to the nines, smelt very strongly of cheap scent and talked loudly in an aggressive voice. No, she certainly wasn’t a nice coloured girl.

  The doctor tried – too hard perhaps – for the next time he called at Spanish Castle a door banged loudly inside the house and a grinning boy told him that Mr Ramage was out.

  ‘And Mrs Ramage?’

  ‘The mistress is not at home.’

  At the end of the path the doctor looked back and saw her at a window peering at him.

  He shook his head, but he never went there again, and the Ramage couple sank out of sight, out of mind.

  It was Mr Eliot, the owner of Twickenham, who started the trouble. He was out with his wife, he related, looking at some young nutmeg trees near the boundary. They had a boy with them who had lighted a fire and put on water for tea. They looked up and saw Ramage coming out from under the trees. He was burnt a deep brown, his hair fell to his shoulders, his beard to his chest. He was wearing sandals and a leather belt, on one side of which hung a cutlass, on the other a large pouch. Nothing else.

  ‘If,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘the man had apologized to my wife, if he’d shown the slightest consciousness of the fact that he was stark naked, I would have overlooked the whole thing. God knows one learned to be tolerant in this wretched place. But not a bit of it. He stared hard at her and came out with: “What an uncomfortable dress – and how ugly!” My wife got very red. Then she said: “Mr Ramage, the kettle is just boiling. Will you have some tea?”” ’