The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Yes, he went down very quietly,’ Lucy was saying as she showed Pauline into the bedroom. Pauline said nothing. She avoided looking at either O’Byrne or Lucy. And O’Byrne’s eyes were fixed on the object she carried in her arms. It was large and silver, like an outsized electric toaster. ‘It can plug in just here,’ said Lucy. Pauline set it down on the bedside table. Lucy sat down at her dressing table and began to comb her hair. ‘I’ll get some water for it in a minute,’ she said.

  Pauline went and stood by the window. There was silence. Then O’Byrne said hoarsely, ‘What’s that thing?’ Lucy turned in her seat. ‘It’s a steriliser,’ she said breezily. ‘Steriliser?’ ‘You know, for sterilising surgical instruments.’ The next question O’Byrne did not dare ask. He felt sick and dizzy. Lucy left the room. Pauline continued to stare out the window into the dark. O’Byrne felt the need to whisper. ‘Hey, Pauline, what’s going on?’ She turned to face him, and said nothing. O’Byrne discovered that the strap round his right wrist was slackening a little, the leather was stretching. His hand was concealed by pillows. He worked it backwards and forwards, and spoke urgently. ‘Look, let’s get out of here. Undo these things.’

  For a moment she hesitated, then she walked round the side of the bed and stared down at him. She shook her head. ‘We’re going to get you.’ The repetition terrified him. He thrashed from side to side. ‘It’s not my idea of a fucking joke,’ he shouted. Pauline turned away. ‘I hate you,’ he heard her say. The right-hand strap gave a little more. ‘I hate you. I hate you.’ He pulled till he thought his arm would break. His hand was too large still for the noose around his wrist. He gave up.

  Now Lucy was at the bedside pouring water into the steriliser. ‘This is a sick joke,’ said O’Byrne. Lucy lifted a flat, black case on to the table. She snapped it open and began to take out long-handled scissors, scalpels and other bright, tapering, silver objects. She lowered them carefully into the water. O’Byrne started to work his right hand again. Lucy removed the black case and set on the table two white kidney bowls with blue rims. In one lay two hypodermic needles, one large, one small. In the other was cotton wool. O’Byrne’s voice shook. ‘What is all this?’ Lucy rested her cool hand on his forehead. She enunciated with precision. ‘This is what they should have done for you at the clinic.’ ‘The clinic … ?’ he echoed. He could see now that Pauline was leaning against the wall drinking from a bottle of scotch. ‘Yes,’ said Lucy, reaching down to take his pulse. ‘Stop you spreading round your secret little diseases.’ ‘And telling lies,’ said Pauline, her voice strained with indignation.

  O’Byrne laughed uncontrollably. ‘Telling lies … telling lies,’ he spluttered. Lucy took the scotch from Pauline and raised it to her lips. O’Byrne recovered. His legs were shaking. ‘You’re both out of your minds.’ Lucy tapped the steriliser and said to Pauline, ‘This will take a few minutes yet. We’ll scrub down in the kitchen.’ O’Byrne tried to raise his head. ‘Where are you going?’ he called after them. ‘Pauline … Pauline.’

  But Pauline had nothing more to say. Lucy stopped in the bedroom doorway and smiled at him. ‘We’ll leave you a pretty little stump to remember us by,’ and she closed the door.

  On the bedside table the steriliser began to hiss. Shortly after it gave out the low rumble of boiling water, and inside the instruments clinked together gently. In terror he pumped his hand. The leather was flaying the skin off his wrist. The noose was riding now round the base of his thumb. Timeless minutes passed. He whimpered and pulled, and the edge of the leather cut deep into his hand. He was almost free.

  The door opened, and Lucy and Pauline carried in a small, low table. Through his fear O’Byrne felt excitement once more, horrified excitement. They arranged the table close to the bed. Lucy bent low over his erection. ‘Oh dear … oh dear,’ she murmured. With tongs Pauline lifted instruments from the boiling water and laid them out in neat silver rows on the starched white tablecloth she had spread across the table. The leather noose slipped forwards fractionally. Lucy sat on the edge of the bed and took the large hypodermic from the bowl. ‘This will make you a little sleepy,’ she promised. She held it upright and expelled a small jet of liquid. And as she reached for the cotton wool O’Byrne’s arm pulled clear. Lucy smiled. She set aside the hypodermic. She leaned forwards once more … warm, scented … she was fixing him with wild red eyes … her fingers played over his tip … she held him still between her fingers. ‘Lie back, Michael, my sweet.’ She nodded briskly at Pauline. ‘If you’ll secure that strap, Nurse Shepherd, then I think we can begin.’

  ANGELA CARTER

  The Courtship of Mr Lyon

  Outside her kitchen window, the hedgerow glistened as if the snow possessed a light of its own; when the sky darkened towards evening, an unearthly, reflected pallor remained behind upon the winter’s landscape, while still the soft flakes floated down. This lovely girl, whose skin possesses that same, inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made all of snow, pauses in her chores in the mean kitchen to look out at the country road. Nothing has passed that way all day; the road is white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin.

  Father said he would be home before nightfall.

  The snow brought down all the telephone wires; he couldn’t have called, even with the best of news.

  The roads are bad. I hope he’ll be safe.

  But the old car stuck fast in a rut, wouldn’t budge an inch; the engine whirred, coughed and died and he was far from home. Ruined, once; then ruined again, as he had learnt from his lawyers that very morning; at the conclusion of the lengthy, slow attempt to restore his fortunes, he had turned out his pockets to find the cash for petrol to take him home. And not even enough money left over to buy his Beauty, his girl-child, his pet, the one white rose she said she wanted; the only gift she wanted, no matter how the case went, how rich he might once again be. She had asked for so little and he had not been able to give it to her. He cursed the useless car, the last straw that broke his spirit; then, nothing for it but to fasten his old sheepskin coat around him, abandon the heap of metal and set off down the snow-filled lane to look for help.

  Behind wrought iron gates, a short, snowy drive performed a reticent flourish before a miniature, perfect, Palladian house that seemed to hide itself shyly behind snow-laden skirts of an antique cypress. It was almost night; that house, with its sweet, retiring, melancholy grace, would have seemed deserted but for a light that flickered in an upstairs window, so vague it might have been the reflection of a star, if any stars could have penetrated the snow that whirled yet more thickly. Chilled through, he pressed the latch of the gate and saw, with a pang, how, on the withered ghost of a tangle of thorns, there clung, still, the faded rag of a white rose.

  The gate clanged loudly shut behind him; too loudly. For an instant, that reverberating clang seemed final, emphatic, ominous as if the gate, now closed, barred all within it from the world outside the walled, wintry garden. And, from a distance, though from what distance he could not tell, he heard the most singular sound in the world: a great roaring, as of a beast of prey.

  In too much need to allow himself to be intimidated, he squared up to the mahogany door. This door was equipped with a knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, with a ring through the nose; as he raised his hand towards it, it came to him this lion’s head was not, as he had thought at first, made of brass, but, instead, of solid gold. Before, however, he could announce his presence, the door swung silently inward on well-oiled hinges and he saw a white hall where the candles of a great chandelier cast their benign light upon so many, many flowers in great, free-standing jars of crystal that it seemed the whole of spring drew him into its warmth with a profound intake of perfumed breath. Yet there was no living person in the hall.

  The door behind him closed as silently as it had opened, yet, this time, he felt no fear although he knew by the pervasive atmosphere of a suspension of reality that he had entered a place of privilege where all the
laws of the world he knew need not necessarily apply, for the very rich are often very eccentric and the house was plainly that of an exceedingly wealthy man. As it was, when nobody came to help him with his coat, he took it off himself. At that, the crystals of the chandelier tinkled a little, as if emitting a pleased chuckle, and the door of a cloakroom opened of its own accord. There were, however, no clothes at all in this cloakroom, not even the statutory country-house garden mackintosh to greet his own squirearchal sheepskin, but, when he emerged again into the hall, he found a greeting waiting for him at last – there was, of all things, a liver and white King Charles spaniel crouched, with head intelligently cocked, on the Kelim runner. It gave him further, comforting proof of his unseen host’s wealth and eccentricity to see the dog wore, in place of a collar, a diamond necklace.

  The dog sprang to its feet in welcome and busily shepherded him (how amusing!) to a snug little leather-panelled study on the first floor, where a low table was drawn up to a roaring log fire. On the table, a silver tray; round the neck of the whisky decanter, a silver tag with the legend: Drink me, while the cover of the silver dish was engraved with the exhortation: Eat me, in a flowing hand. This dish contained sandwiches of thick-cut roast beef, still bloody. He drank the one with soda and ate the other with some excellent mustard thoughtfully provided in a stoneware pot, and, when the spaniel saw to it he had served himself, she trotted off about her own business.

  All that remained to make Beauty’s father entirely comfortable was to find, in a curtained recess, not only a telephone but the card of a garage that advertised a twenty-four-hour rescue service; a couple of calls later and he had confirmed, thank God, there was no serious trouble, only the car’s age and the cold weather … could he pick it up from the village in an hour? And directions to the village, but half a mile away, were supplied, in a new tone of deference, as soon as he described the house from where he was calling.

  And he was disconcerted but, in his impecunious circumstances, relieved to hear the bill would go on his hospitable if absent host’s account; no question, assured the mechanic. It was the master’s custom.

  Time for another whisky as he tried, unsuccessfully, to call Beauty and tell her he would be late; but the lines were still down, although, miraculously, the storm had cleared as the moon rose and now a glance between the velvet curtains revealed a landscape as of ivory with an inlay of silver. Then the spaniel appeared again, with his hat in her careful mouth, prettily wagging her tail, as if to tell him it was time to be gone, that this magical hospitality was over.

  As the door swung to behind him, he saw the lion’s eyes were made of agate.

  Great wreaths of snow now precariously curded the rose trees and, when he brushed against a stem on his way to the gate, a chill armful softly thudded to the ground to reveal, as if miraculously preserved beneath it, one last, single, perfect rose that might have been the last rose left living in all the white winter, and of so intense and yet delicate a fragrance it seemed to ring like a dulcimer on the frozen air.

  How could his host, so mysterious, so kind, deny Beauty her present?

  Not now distant but close at hand, close as that mahogany front door, rose a mighty, furious roaring; the garden seemed to hold its breath in apprehension. But still, because he loved his daughter, Beauty’s father stole the rose.

  At that, every window of the house blazed with furious light and a fugal baying, as of a pride of lions, introduced his host.

  There is always a dignity about great bulk, an assertiveness, a quality of being more there than most of us are. The being who now confronted Beauty’s father seemed to him, in his confusion, vaster than the house he owned, ponderous yet swift, and the moonlight glittered on his great, mazy head of hair, on the eyes green as agate, on the golden hairs of the great paws that grasped his shoulders so that their claws pierced the sheepskin as he shook him like an angry child shakes a doll.

  This leonine apparition shook Beauty’s father until his teeth rattled and then dropped him sprawling on his knees while the spaniel, darting from the open door, danced round them, yapping distractedly, like a lady at whose dinner party blows have been exchanged.

  ‘My good fellow—’ stammered Beauty’s father; but the only response was a renewed roar.

  ‘Good fellow? I am no good fellow! I am the Beast, and you must call me Beast, while I call you, Thief!’

  ‘Forgive me for robbing your garden, Beast!’

  Head of a lion; mane and mighty paws of a lion; he reared on his hind legs like an angry lion yet wore a smoking jacket of dull red brocade and was the owner of that lovely house and the low hills that cupped it.

  ‘It was for my daughter,’ said Beauty’s father. ‘All she wanted, in the whole world, was one white, perfect rose.’

  The Beast rudely snatched the photograph her father drew from his wallet and inspected it, first brusquely, then with a strange kind of wonder, almost the dawning of surmise. The camera had captured a certain look she had, sometimes, of absolute sweetness and absolute gravity, as if her eyes might pierce appearances and see your soul. When he handed the picture back, the Beast took good care not to scratch the surface with his claws.

  ‘Take her her rose, then, but bring her to dinner,’ he growled; and what else was there to be done?

  Although her father had told her of the nature of the one who waited for her, she could not control an instinctual shudder of fear when she saw him, for a lion is a lion and a man is a man and, though lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty and, besides, they have no respect for us: why should they? Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them, and some kind of sadness in his agate eyes, that looked almost blind, as if sick of sight, moved her heart.

  He sat, impassive as a figurehead, at the top of the table; the dining room was Queen Anne, tapestried, a gem. Apart from an aromatic soup kept hot over a spirit lamp, the food, though exquisite, was cold – a cold bird, a cold soufflé, cheese. He asked her father to serve them from a buffet and, himself, ate nothing. He grudgingly admitted what she had already guessed, that he disliked the presence of servants because, she thought, a constant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness, but the spaniel sat at his feet throughout the meal, jumping up from time to time to see that everything was in order.

  How strange he was. She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her. There seemed a heavy, soundless pressure upon her in his house, as if it lay under water, and when she saw the great paws lying on the arm of his chair, she thought: they are the death of any tender herbivore. And such a one she felt herself to be, Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial.

  Yet she stayed, and smiled, because her father wanted her to do so; and when the Beast told her how he would aid her father’s appeal against the judgement, she smiled with both her mouth and her eyes. But when, as they sipped their brandy, the Beast, in the diffuse, rumbling purr with which he conversed, suggested, with a hint of shyness, of fear of refusal, that she should stay here, with him, in comfort, while her father returned to London to take up the legal cudgels again, she forced a smile. For she knew with a pang of dread, as soon as he spoke, that it would be so and her visit to the Beast must be, on some magically reciprocal scale, the price of her father’s good fortune.

  Do not think she had no will of her own; only, she was possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree and, besides, she would gladly have gone to the ends of the earth for her father, whom she loved dearly.

  Her bedroom contained a marvellous glass bed; she had a bathroom, with towels thick as fleece and vials of suave unguents; and a little parlour of her own, the walls of which were covered with an antique paper of birds of paradise and Chinamen, where there were precious books and pictures and the flowers grown by invisible gardeners in the Beast’s hothouses. Next morning, her father kissed her and drove away with a renewed hope about him that ma
de her glad, but, all the same, she longed for the shabby home of their poverty. The unaccustomed luxury about her she found poignant, because it gave no pleasure to its possessor and himself she did not see all day as if, curious reversal, she frightened him, although the spaniel came and sat with her, to keep her company. Today, the spaniel wore a neat choker of turquoises.

  Who prepared her meals? Loneliness of the Beast; all the time she stayed there, she saw no evidence of another human presence but the trays of food that arrived on a dumb waiter inside a mahogany cupboard in her parlour. Dinner was eggs Benedict and grilled veal; she ate it as she browsed in a book she had found in the rosewood revolving bookcase, a collection of courtly and elegant French fairy tales about white cats who were transformed princesses and fairies who were birds. Then she pulled a sprig of muscat grapes from a fat bunch for her dessert and found herself yawning; she discovered she was bored. At that, the spaniel took hold of her skirt with its velvet mouth and gave it a firm but gentle tug. She allowed the dog to trot before her to the study in which her father had been entertained and there, to her well-disguised dismay, she found her host, seated beside the fire with a tray of coffee at his elbow from which she must pour.