The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

Home > Other > The Penguin Book of the British Short Story > Page 72
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 72

by Philip Hensher


  Even when I have passed my test and put Keith behind me, I can’t imagine that I’ll do a lot of driving. Public transport is enough to get me to the hospital, though I sometimes use my bicycle on a Sunday, partly for the exercise and partly to dramatize my errand, if I’m bringing something for my lover. On the bicycle I can feel like a courier whose package will make a difference to the person waiting for it.

  My lover keeps the television on all the time, just turning up the sound when there’s something he actually wants to watch. At the moment, a weatherman is standing in front of two maps of the country. I expect they represent the weather tonight and tomorrow. But the weatherman, if he wanted, could also show us the weather of our two healths. His vocabulary of symbols is meagre but it will stretch. My map will be full of smiling suns and light refreshing breezes, a fantasy of summer; my lover’s map a nightmare winter, chock-a-block with gales and freezing showers. My lover looks without interest at the screen as it changes. Some of his calm is really exhaustion, but some of his calm is really calm. It helps that he’s still in touch socially with the few people he exposed to risk. With a bravery that to me seems insane, they’ve all taken the test, and they all tested negative.

  He keeps a list of his sexual partners, does my lover, though it’s not so detailed he could use it to track people down if he’d lost touch. I only found out about it recently. It’s at the back of his diary, but then I only found out about the diary recently. Suddenly there was this battered book on the bed, and my lover was saying, oh yes, he always used to keep a diary, he’d just got out of the habit. He’d just now come across it and was taking a look.

  Even my lover had to admit, after a little reading, that his diary-keeping had never been regular; he wrote in his diary only when a relationship was on the rocks. It took tears to get the words flowing and then he would write what were in effect letters to his lovers, full of sombre accusations and depressive spite. He even read me a detailed account of my own selfishness. This was his version of a crisis of which I have no version, since I survived it by not noticing.

  I asked if I could look at the diary, and he passed it across. At the back of the book there was a list of numbers and names, starting with ‘1. John in Toyota Corolla.’ Number two was Mark, and number three was Mark and Ben. The list went into the low forties before it met a scrawl, twice underlined: ‘Enough of this rubbish.’ The list-making impulse had started to falter even before then. Two numbers in the thirties were entered as ‘What was the name?’ and ‘Macho Letdown’.

  My lover gave me a beady look as I read his diary and asked, ‘Are you the sort of person who reads people’s diaries?’

  I didn’t know there was any other sort of person, but I avoided the question by holding the book up and waving it. ‘The evidence against me is strong.’

  ‘I mean, when the owner’s not around?’

  ‘Only if I can find it.’ I’ve only made a couple of searches since then – as much to see if he was bothered enough to hide it as because I’m curious – and I haven’t found it, so I suppose the answer to the question is, Yes, he was bothered enough.

  The limitations on my lover’s future make his past the more precious, and I find that I’m a bit bothered, after all, that I don’t know where his diary is.

  I bring my lover hot thick soups, in a big old-fashioned vacuum flask with a wide neck. Conventional soups bear the same relationship to my soup as the sun bears to those collapsed stars whose every speck outweighs it. An oxtail is a wispy thing compared to what I make of it with the strong rendering of my pressure cooker. My soups are concentrated expressions of the will to nourish.

  But tonight my lover is not to be nourished. ‘You know I hate innards,’ he says, pushing the plate of soup away almost as soon as I’ve poured it.

  I’m ashamed that I don’t know my lover’s preferences as well as I should, but I’m also offended and I protest. ‘Oxtail isn’t innards!’

  ‘It’s as good as.’

  ‘Oxtail couldn’t be further from innards. Be reasonable. If cows kept their tails on the inside how could they deal with flies?’

  Even as I say this, I realize that talk of flies is among the poorer triggers of appetite. The ward is full of tiny insects, as it happens, sustained out of season by the warmth and the abundance of fruit.

  Even unmolested, the fruit would look incongruous beside the stack of moulded cardboard vomit-bowls on my lover’s bedside table. They look, with their broad rims turned down at one side, like jaunty little hats, as if they were there for use in a big dance production number. We’ve tried to bring them into our private world by referring to them as ‘Berkeleys’ or ‘Astaires’, but the name that has stuck, vomit-hats, leaves them uncomfortably real. These homely objects resist the final push into euphemism.

  Our little tussle over the soup reminds me of how poorly matched we are in habits and appetites. We don’t even have the same taste in bread. I like wholemeal, but his stomach can deal most easily with inflated plastic white, and naturally I give way to him. All the same, I’d have thought somebody could make a killing out of couples like us, by producing a hybrid loaf that combined the two, all the goodness and bran sucked out of each alternate slice and shunted into the next one.

  In this way among others, we don’t present a united front. Our teamwork seems ragged, while the illness we’re fighting is ruthlessly co-ordinated. But then it’s only recently, since he came into hospital in fact, that I have thought of him, truly, as my lover.

  Before then I compared him in my mind – often very flatteringly, it’s true – with other men past or possible. But now I compare him only with the world as it will be when he is subtracted from it, not with rival beds but with his bed, empty. That is what locks the phrase in place: my lover.

  My lover and I never used pet names or endearments before his first visit to hospital, but how stupid it sounds when I say so. It’s like saying I never had much use for pot plants and cushions before I came to live in this condemned cell. Except that the unstoppable progress of medical science has taken our condemned cell and turned it into a whole suite of condemned cells.

  Our endearment system is based round the core-word pie, derived from the phrase sweetie-pie but given its independence in a whole series of verbal caresses. The turning-point in its history was my buying an Easter egg with the message piped on it, ‘WITH LOVE TO MY SWEETIE PIE’. This was at a time when a raised patch on the roof of my lover’s mouth had been diagnosed as a cancer, a separate sentence on his mouth that his tongue must read and remember every time it makes contact, and I wanted to go to meet him armed with more than a hug. It comforted me to watch the woman at Thorntons in Cambridge – where a free message in icing was a seasonal offer – at work on the egg with her expert nozzle of fondant and her smile of romantic voyeurism. The smile would have hardened on her lips like painted sugar if she knew she was decorating a sweet to take the bitterness out of a malignancy.

  Pie was the word that stuck, the last part of the inscribed egg that my lover would have eaten, I’m sure, if he hadn’t kept the whole thing intact, as a totem of chocolate. Pie stuck to a number of phrases, private ones at first and then sentences of ordinary conversation, by slip of tongue to start with and afterwards defiantly, mixing embarrassment and the refusal to be embarrassed. Pie functions as pet name (dear one), as interrogative (are you awake?), as exclamation (how could you say such a thing!).

  So near have I approached to that which I vowed I would never use, the edged endearment of the grown-up, the darling of protest if not yet the darling of bitter reproach.

  Pie is allied by assonance with my (my Pie), by alliteration with expressive adjectives: poor Pie, precious Pie, pretty Pie.

  Occasionally it appears in phrases of estrangement, though its use acts as a guarantee that estrangement is reversible: crusty Pie, poison Pie, piranha Pie.

  Written down and rationalized as an irrational number – π – it loses a little of its sugar. Transposed
into fake Italian mio Pio – it acquires a register almost operatic. As a double diminutive – as pielet or pilot – it brings into play a fresh set of overtones.

  Perhaps endearment, verbal sweetness so concentrated nothing else can survive, will prevent infection, the way honey does. Honey yanks the moisture out of bacteria with the violence of its osmosis. Honey has been found uncorrupt in the tombs of the Pharaohs, though it had been left there to be used, after all, to sweeten the darkness of the dead.

  Who could have thought when the treasures were laid out in the vault that the bees’ modest embalming would last so well, that their glandular syrup of flowers would turn out so nearly eternal?

  My lover raises the remote control panel and turns the television off. Late at night, the nurses stop being so demanding, and even Armchair and the Vet can be relied on to stay away. My lover and I don’t have to be so guarded in our behaviour.

  This is the time we draft our imaginary letters to newspapers and public figures, our radical complaints and proposals. My lover wants to live long enough to be the only survivor of an air crash, so that he can say at the press conference, where he will have an arm in plaster – perhaps only a finger – ‘You see? God doesn’t hate me after all. Whatever you think.’ In the meantime he will settle for composing imaginary letters to the papers, setting the record straight day by day.

  Sometimes one or the other of us will shed some tears, but we haven’t properly settled the agenda of our crying. We’re both New Men, I suppose that’s what it comes down to, so we have a lot of respect for tears and what they represent. Crying is a piece of expressive behaviour that needs no apology and isn’t, absolutely isn’t, a demand for attention. We pride ourselves on being able to ask for affection straight out, without needing to break down to do it. There’s something a little crass about a hug as a response to tears. A hug can be an act of denial, even, and neither of us is going to make that mistake. We claim the right to cry uncomforted, letting the discharge do its work uninterrupted.

  But in practice, I get so distressed by his tears, and he by mine, that we regress just as fast as we possibly can, and smother the expressiveness that we have so much respect for under a ton of hugs.

  Endlessly we reformulate our feelings for each other. This is the same superstition that makes people put up bumper stickers – Keep Your Distance, Baby on Board, I ♥ my π – to make the roads safe and life go on for ever.

  Fate is a dual-control Metro, that much I know, but I’m not clear about who’s in which seat. It may be me, or it may be my lover, that squeezes the brake when we approach a bend too fast, or who pops the clutch in to prevent a stall. ‘Baby clutch,’ I can hear a familiar voice saying in my ear, ‘baby-baby clutch,’ as we move off up the hill to where we must go.

  GEORGE MACKAY BROWN

  Three Old Men

  The old man came out of his house and it was a dark night. A few snowflakes drifted on to his head.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why I want to leave the fire on a cold night like this. I want to get to the village but why I don’t remember.’

  He guessed his way along the track going down from the hill, and once he stumbled and almost fell into the wet ditch.

  ‘Well, thank you, staff, for keeping me on my feet,’ said the old man to his stick. ‘A fine thing, if they found us in the morning, you and me in a drift in the ditch, as stiff and cold as one another.’

  The old man laughed, and he went slowly down the cart road from the hill to the village. He felt happy, though now the snow was in his beard, and he struck out with his staff and startled a star from a wayside stone.

  At the crossroads, half-way to the village, a shadow lingered. The shadow declared itself to be a man, because there was the small flame of a match being applied to a pipe. The face shone fitfully once or twice and was part of the night again.

  ‘What’s an old man like you doing out in a night like this?’ said the voice at the crossroads, and the seeker in the darkness recognised Ben, the retired skipper, from the far end of the island. They had sat in the same classroom at the village school, but they hadn’t seen each other for thirty years, the time Ben was at sea, and now only occasionally at the island regatta or the agricultural show.

  ‘The truth is,’ said the old man from the hill, ‘I don’t rightly remember. I know I have some errand to the village, and maybe it’ll come back to me before I get to the bridge.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ben, ‘we might as well walk on together. I expect it’s drink you’re after, to keep out the cold. We can hold each other up on the way home.’

  The two old men laughed. The skipper had a smell of hot rum on his breath. Could he be wanting more grog in the inn?

  ‘I just thought,’ said Ben, ‘I would like to stretch my legs under the stars. Only there’s not a star to be seen. It’s as black as the ace of spades.’

  The two old men went arm-in-arm along the track. Sometimes one or the other of them would give a bark of laughter or a cry of annoyance as his foot struck against a stone in the middle of the road.

  The snow was falling thicker than ever. The old sailor passed his tobacco pouch to the old shepherd, but Sam had left his pipe at home. The match spurted, and the flame showed the hollowed cheeks of Ben as he drew in the smoke, before a falling snowflake fell on the burning match – a drifting moth – and quenched it.

  It was the darkest night of winter, and such a snow cloud was drifting across the island that they couldn’t see the lights of the village.

  But they knew the general direction.

  Once they both left the road and sallied against a barbed wire fence, and one of the travellers got a deep scrape on his hand, and a fencing post knocked the burning pipe out of the other’s mouth.

  Then they said one or two uncomplimentary things about the farmer who had been so inconsiderate as to put up his fence in that particular place. Ben found his pipe in the snow drift. Sam shook beads of blood from his hand.

  They went on, grumbling and laughing.

  ‘I hear trouble,’ said the old shepherd.

  ‘I hear nothing,’ said the old skipper, ‘but then I’m hard of hearing since that last trip I made to China.’

  What came to them through the darkness was music – a fragment of a reel played on a fiddle – a scratching and a scraping that could only be made by Willie the miller.

  ‘Well,’ said Willie as the skipper and the shepherd came up to him where he stood at the buttress of the bridge over the burn, ‘I thought I would be playing tonight to an owl and an otter maybe. But here come two old men. Imagine that.’

  On the three old men walked together. And the snow fell thicker about them.

  The miller put his trembling fiddle inside his coat.

  The shepherd drew his scarf across his mouth.

  There was a lighthouse miles away across the Pentland Firth, in Scotland. It pulsed regularly. The sky was clear to the south.

  Sometimes one or other of them would say something, but the snow muffled the words. They struggled on, arm in arm, lifting heavy feet out of the drifted ruts.

  Ben said, in the ringing voice he had once used on the quarter deck, ‘I think we’re in for a real blizzard. I feel it in my bones.’

  It was as if his words put out the lighthouse. They could see its flashings no more. The night was thickening.

  They stopped at the crown of the brae to get their breath.

  ‘I’d have been right enough,’ said the miller, ‘playing this fiddle to the cat at home.’

  In the slow wavering downward flake-drift their faces were three blurs.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Ben. ‘When I was in India a long while ago, I bought a piece of ivory from a merchant in Bombay. Well, I have a lot of interesting objects from all over the world at home. But this piece of ivory I always liked best. It has a bunch of grapes carved on it. Tonight I thought to myself, “Ben, what’s the use of a houseful of treasures to an old man like you? You mig
ht be dead before the first daffodils in April.” So I put the carving in my pocket and came out like an old fool into this blizzard.’

  The three men stood there in the heart of the snowstorm.

  ‘Well now,’ said Sam the shepherd, ‘that’s a very strange thing you’ve said, Ben. I’ll tell you why. I had three golden sovereigns put away in a stone jar on the mantelpiece. It had been there for twenty years. It was to pay for my funeral, that money. It struck me this afternoon at sunset – “They’ll have to bury you anyway, Sam,” I said to myself. “You’re too old now for a pauper’s grave. Why don’t you take the money,” I said to myself, “and give it to the living?” … ’

  The three old men laughed, a muffled threefold merriment on the crown of the island.

  The snow fell thicker still.

  Willie the miller said, ‘I tell you what – I’ve been working on a new fiddle tune since harvest. I think it’s the best music I ever made. I call it Milling the Barley. I thought, “I’m going to play this reel somewhere where it’ll be truly appreciated” … But where could that be?’

  ‘We’d better be getting on then,’ said Ben.

  So they linked arms and put their heads into the slow black drift. Here and there the snow was up to their knees.

  ‘Watch where you’re going,’ said Willie, as if the other two were responsible for their wayward progress.

  Then they were all in a deep drift, topsy-turvy, a sprawl and a welter and struggle of old men!

 

‹ Prev