The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Ssh,’ said my mother. ‘He’s gone for a widdle.’ Her voice was all choked.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ said Mr Baines. ‘It’s not worth it.’

  ‘He sickens me,’ my mother said. ‘Sickens me. Whimpering over the least thing when inside he’s like a piece of rock. He’s hard. He’s got no pity for man nor beast.’

  ‘Don’t waste your tears,’ said Mr Baines. ‘You can’t get blood from a stone.’

  At that moment the ball flew past the wicket and, striking the ground, rolled to my grandfather’s feet. He leapt up, and striding to the side of the pitch, chucked the ball at the batsman. He didn’t exactly bowl it; he sort of dipped one shoulder and flung the ball like a boy skimming a stone on water. The batsman, taken by surprise at such an accurate throw, swung his bat. The scarlet ball shot over Mr Baines’s shoulder and went like a bullet from a gun after my father.

  When we ran up to him he was stood there in the shadow of the Messerschmitt with his hand clutched to the side of his head. The ball hadn’t hit him full on, merely grazed the side of his temple. But he was bleeding like a pig.

  ‘That’s a turn-up for the book,’ said Mr Baines.

  DOUGLAS DUNN

  Bobby’s Room

  Henry Pollock was the only child of only children, and his four grandparents were dead. When he was twelve, in 1954, he and his parents left Glasgow on a motoring holiday. They stayed in a succession of hotels all over the Borders and the southwest of Scotland. At one place, they found that the hotels and guesthouses were full. It was a town Mrs Pollock particularly wanted to visit, and all the rooms were booked up for some local annual event. Mr Pollock was irate. His wife chided him for not having telephoned a reservation in advance, as, she said, she had suggested in the first place.

  ‘We said potluck was part of the charm, did we not?’ was Henry’s father’s riposte. Bickering in the car park lasted almost an hour.

  Pollock was a tall man, powerful, proud, and successful; Henry had got used to his obstinate refusals to give in to his wife’s complaints or preferences, to which, in the end, he always conformed without seeming to surrender. Harsh words when they fell out were, Henry knew, a prelude to that kind of morning on which he didn’t see them until it was nearly noon. If these were mornings when he went to school, then his mother hurriedly threw his breakfast together and kissed him on the ear before running back upstairs in her kimono.

  Even in the small space of the car, they managed to ignore Henry, and he knew better than to say anything.

  ‘If you’re in such a hurry to find somewhere, then why don’t you drive?’ his father asked Mrs Pollock.

  ‘You know I can’t. Don’t be so stupid.’

  ‘Then allow me to the judge of when we leave and when we don’t. I need petrol, in any case.’

  ‘You can’t possibly need petrol. You filled up this morning in Dumfries.’

  Eventually they got under way again, and after a few miles Pollock stopped the car outside a substantial stone-built villa, a house much like their own back in Glasgow; a notice board advertised that it offered accommodations.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘I think it’s seen better days, that’s what I think,’ said Mrs Pollock, who was still simmering. Her husband went to see if there were two rooms available, and to investigate what the place was like. ‘It doesn’t even have a drive,’ she said to Henry. ‘Where will we put the car?’

  ‘I don’t see any cars,’ Henry said, ‘so they must have rooms.’

  ‘When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it. Netherbank,’ she said, sounding the name of the house as proof of its unsuitability.

  Pollock returned a few minutes later. ‘It’s first-rate,’ he said with genuine enthusiasm, leaning into the car. ‘The rooms are large and spotlessly clean, very airy and spacious, and no one else is staying there.’ Breezily, he listed the qualifications Mrs Pollock always insisted were necessary for a night’s comfort. ‘We can have the sitting room to ourselves, if we want it, and you’ll find the bathroom highly acceptable. I think we should take it, Irene, it’s run by a lovely old couple. You’ll adore them.’

  Netherbank was run by a Mrs Bawden. She was over sixty, silver-haired, round, short, respectable, and as Mrs Pollock said afterwards, very nicely spoken. She took it in her stride when Mrs Pollock asked if she could have a look at what she was offering for dinner. ‘Normally, I prefer a proper restaurant. But my husband’s very tired after a day’s driving.’

  ‘Some people ask me for what they call an “evening meal”,’ Mrs Bawden said, lifting the lid off a saucepan. ‘I call it dinner. I’ve always called it dinner, and I won’t change now. Round about here, people call lunch dinner. But I call it luncheon, and I call it luncheon at twelve-thirty. And I call tea tea. I don’t know where we’ll all end up if we begin to call things by the wrong names.’ Mrs Pollock couldn’t agree more.

  They stayed for five nights. Henry knew one of the reasons his parents liked the place so much: Mrs Bawden was very obliging. Before Mrs Pollock could ask, Mrs Bawden offered to keep an eye on Henry if they wanted to go off by themselves for a day, or go to dinner in a hotel restaurant about ten miles away which Mrs Bawden had heard was outstanding for its seafood. ‘But Mrs Bawden, you’ll do yourself out of business,’ his mother said.

  ‘No, no, I won’t. You’re on holiday, and it’ll be my pleasure to help you enjoy yourselves.’ Mrs Pollock revelled in being the beneficiary of that sort of consideration. Henry’s parents had three days on their own without him, and three evenings at the famous restaurant.

  Henry wandered round the hills and farms, and walked the two miles to the sea. He read, and he watched Mr Bawden at work in his garden. The old man was hard of hearing, or said he was, and when Henry tried to talk to him he pointed to an ear, smiled, and went back to his weeding or hoeing.

  These were the last days of their holiday. His parents loved it. ‘I haven’t felt so refreshed and well in years!’ said Henry’s mother as they drove home. ‘And Mrs Bawden – what a wonderful woman! Her cooking’s pre-war! We were lucky to find it. It’s the sort of place you could drive right past without giving it so much as a moment’s notice.’ After that, she and her husband looked at each other in the way that made Henry feel he wasn’t there. A little later, Mrs Pollock started to sing. She coaxed Henry to join in. When he didn’t, she turned round and said, ‘You’ll grow up to be miserable. Why won’t you sing, like the rest of us?’

  Two years later, there was a week in early June when Henry’s father was more thoughtful than usual. After dinner he did a lot of meditative gardening. Tired of that, he sat in the lounge with an open book on his lap. Henry’s mother brought him tea or coffee, asked him if he wanted something stronger, or something to eat, and in her busy efforts to leave him alone made a nuisance of herself. It was obvious to Henry that his father was making his mind up about something important. From time to time he saw his parents talk quietly and seriously to each other. They cuddled in the kitchen even more often than usual.

  ‘Why don’t I phone her? I kept a note of the number, you know,’ he heard his mother say one evening.

  ‘Do you think she would?’ Pollock asked her. ‘It’s not really what she does.’

  ‘Almost three months at her usual rates is probably very good business for her, especially if we add something on for her trouble. I imagine she’ll be only too pleased.’

  ‘It’d be ideal. But what do we do about the weeks of school he’ll have to miss?’

  ‘Darling, I’ve no intention of being left behind. It’s an opportunity to travel I won’t let pass by, especially since the offer specifically includes me as well. It’s not as if you’ll have to fork out for my fare and hotel bills. Some of us were prevented from travelling by the war, you know, not to mention marriage and motherhood.’

  ‘If this trip’s successful, there will have to be others, as a matter of course. It’s a big project. It’s not one bridge, it’s
a network. I don’t look forward to going away without you, and I want you to come with me. But the best thing might be to start thinking about boarding school.’

  ‘Were Henry younger, I’d say no, naturally. But at his age boarding school is probably a very adventurous proposition. I know it was for Alice Wylie’s brother.’

  Later that evening, Henry heard the telephone being used. He looked down into the hall from the top of the stairs and saw his mother leaning against the opposite wall while his father spoke into the phone. She was smoking, which she did only in company to be polite, or when she was agitated. Then she, too, went over to the phone and began to speak into it. Later, his mother called him to come down to the sitting room.

  ‘Your mother and I have to go to Singapore,’ his father said. ‘We’ll be gone for most of July and all of August and September. And I’m afraid it just isn’t practical to take you with us.’

  ‘You remember Mrs Bawden, and Netherbank?’ His wife spoke sooner than Pollock would have liked. ‘We’ve arranged for you to stay with her.’

  ‘What about school?’ Henry’s tone of voice was meant to suggest that weeks of missed classes could be disastrous.

  ‘Henry, you’re the last person I can imagine slipping behind. A few weeks won’t be a setback to you.’

  His mother’s way of speaking to him, her confidence in his maturity and academic excellence, made Henry want to fight back. He felt inclined to be stubborn and obstructive. ‘There isn’t a lot to do at Mrs Bawden’s,’ he said.

  ‘We both think it’s ideal.’

  ‘We’ve no choice but to leave you behind.’ his father said. ‘We’ll be happier, much happier, knowing you’re somewhere we can feel easy in our minds about.’

  Henry looked at his mother, hoping she would understand that he expected her to stay behind with him. She said, ‘I’ll talk to the headmaster on Monday. You can arrange for your teachers to give you a programme of study. You can do it on your own – I’m sure you can. And if you think you can’t you’re underrating yourself.’ He knew enough about her to know that if at his age she had been given a ‘programme of study’ she’d have collapsed in tears.

  Instead of making it difficult for them, he accepted it, and resigned himself. He knew why they had chosen Mrs Bawden and Netherbank. They had been happy there, and assumed that he had liked it, too. It was a place and a few days in their lives that meant something in their happiness. He wondered why they could continue to be so ignorant of his feelings. Mrs Bawden was not a complete stranger, but she was the next thing to it – the landlady of a guesthouse, a species his mother usually loathed.

  ‘Don’t feel unwanted,’ his mother said. ‘It would suit us better, much better, if you could come with us. But it isn’t possible, so we have to make the best of it.’

  When the time came, they drove him to Mrs Bawden’s with suitcases, books, tennis racquet, binoculars, and field guides to the birds and wildflowers of the British Isles. Nature study was his mother’s idea. ‘When I get back, I want to find you thoroughly up to the mark in country life,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonderful opportunity for you. I’ve always been opposed to townies.’ He tried to think of what it was she craved so determinedly that it made a trip to Singapore necessary to her.

  She wept as she said goodbye. Henry felt like weeping on his own account.

  ‘I know you won’t give Mrs Bawden any trouble,’ she said. It was the wrong thing to have said. Obedient to the point of filial perfection, he had never given anyone the least bit of trouble in his life.

  ‘How long does post take from Singapore?’ Mrs Pollock asked her husband.

  ‘Airmail,’ he said. ‘Pretty fast.’

  ‘Then I’ll write at least once a week, and I’ll expect you to do the same,’ she told Henry. With that, she left for the car, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  ‘You haven’t left me your address in Singapore,’ Henry said. Pollock had to call for Mrs Bawden to bring a piece of paper for him to write it down on. He was embarrassed, talking about rush, last-minute details, oversights.

  Henry had reckoned on eating alone in the dining room, like any other guest, but he ate with the Bawdens in their kitchen. ‘No aunts, no uncles,’ said Mr Bawden, as the old couple explored Henry’s family. ‘So no cousins, either. No great loss, if you ask me. A big scatter of kin makes you feel guilty at not keeping in touch, which you can’t do, you know, unless you’re a man of means and leisure.’

  ‘I’ve second cousins,’ Henry offered.

  ‘I was closer to two of my second cousins than to any of my first,’ said Mrs Bawden.

  ‘I’ve never met them,’ said Henry.

  ‘Singapore’s a long, long journey,’ she said, pushing a bowl of cauliflower towards him.

  ‘Home-grown,’ said Mr Bawden. ‘We haven’t eaten a tinned vegetable in twenty years.’

  As he lay awake in bed, Henry pondered his affection for his parents, and decided it was becoming as distant and routine as his parents’ love of him. They were his parents, therefore he loved them; he was their son, therefore they loved him – it was as mathematical as that. Co-operation between them was beginning to thin out, like the darkness in the triangle of dawn now at the top of the curtains. His mother prodded him to be the scholar of his class at school, and was proud of his examination victories; but she nagged him for being too studious and staying in when he should have been outside and complained of his lack of interest in sport. They expected him to be perfect, but they neglected him.

  He had a different room from the one he had slept in two years before. It was at the front of the house, under the eaves; from its protruding window he could look at a small wedge of sea and the right-hand tip of an island that could be walked to at low tide over the sands. Darkness turned to a transparent grey, and objects in the room slowly became visible. Shelves in an alcove contained dozens of books of boyish interest – books on ships and the sea, the Empire, foreign countries, warlike history, wildlife, fishing, landmarks in engineering and exploration, most of them heavy and already obsolete. There was a home-made model warship on a chest of drawers. Pictures on the wall did not quite cover the cleaner paint left behind from those that had been taken down. His dressing gown, on the hook behind the door, looked like another person in the room. He imagined that the owner of the books was a long-lost son of the Bawdens, dead, probably, in the war.

  ‘Was my room your son’s?’ he asked Mr Bawden, who pointed to his ear as Henry began to repeat his question.

  ‘We thought you’d like it better than the rooms we let to the holidaymakers,’ he said. ‘Or she did. You’ll find out,’ he said, as if excusing himself in advance for any apparent lack of initiative on his part. ‘Mrs Bawden is the boss round here. She wears the trousers.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest. Somewhere or other.’ He jabbed his rake on the dusty ground. ‘It’s good soil for carrots. And there’s no better earth for potatoes.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Good God, no. What gave you that idea? All that’s wrong with Bobby is that he’s a bit wayward when it comes to writing letters. What made you think he was dead?’

  Henry was embarrassed, and with no way of explaining himself. Mr Bawden shrugged and retreated into his deafness and gardening.

  Mrs Bawden was obviously told of Henry’s questions in the garden. At dinner she recounted Bobby’s travels – his letters from Australia, where he had spent three years, the good job in Hong Kong he’d thrown up on a whim in order to go to Canada. ‘We’re about due a letter from him soon.’

  ‘What’s that?’ her husband asked.

  ‘I said we’re about due a letter from Bobby.’

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Mr Bawden.

  When Henry offered to do Mrs Bawden’s shopping, it seemed as if she had been expecting him to ask. She gave him a list, and he pedalled the two miles to the nearest shop on a bicycle that had been Bobby’s.
/>
  A family of five moved in, and stayed for three nights. They were boisterous, but their liveliness appeared toned down out of respect for someone else’s house. Mrs Bawden had that effect on people. Henry kept out of their way. When he came down to say good night, Mr Bawden, alone in the kitchen with a book, directed him to the guests’ sitting room. He found Mrs Bawden there with the father and mother of the visiting family.

  ‘And this is Bobby in his uniform,’ she was saying.

  ‘My, he’s a fine-looking young man.’

  ‘And here’s another one, with some friends of his from the same ship.’

  ‘I’m off to bed now,’ Henry told her.

  ‘Good night, Henry.’

  He was disconcerted by the sight of Mrs Bawden on the sofa, with a guest on either side of her, showing photographs of her son to people she had never seen before and might never see again. There was an amiable candour in her affectionate disappointment in Bobby, and it jolted Henry, who saw it as a failure of reticence, an openness that compromised her loyalty to her son. Snapshots of her son were being touted to strangers and were symptoms of an unhappiness she was too proud to notice.

  ‘Is it all right if I take a cup of cocoa upstairs with me?’ he asked Mr Bawden.

  ‘Help yourself,’ said the old man. Henry boiled the kettle and opened the cocoa tin. ‘What is it, through there?’ Mr Bawden asked. ‘Snapshots and airmail letters?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My wife, what’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s talking to the guests.’

  ‘See any photographs?’

  ‘I think she is showing them photographs.’

  The old man went back to his book.

  Henry wondered how Mrs Bawden selected the people who were treated to her photograph albums. Perhaps everyone was, and perhaps his parents, two years before, had been shown the same photographs, with the same pride, and had listened to the same reminiscences. He felt sure that the visiting couple would have asked who Henry was, and been told that his parents had gone to Singapore, that his father was a civil engineer, and that they had stayed at Netherbank and thought it an ideal place to board their son while they were away. ‘You ought to come home, Bobby,’ he said to the vanished son. ‘Not only does your mother miss you, but she talks about you to people she hardly knows. Worse, she’s probably talking about me.’