The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

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The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 76

by Philip Hensher


  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘I should like to know whether you did take exception to what I said.’

  ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you without clearing up this uncomfortable matter. I would hate – I would be very distressed – to think I had caused even unintentional pain to any girl in my charge. Please tell me if you thought I spoke amiss.’

  ‘Oh no. No, I didn’t. No.’

  How reluctant a judge, poor Emily, how ill-equipped, how hopeless, to the extent of downright lying, of betraying the principles of exactness. The denial felt like a recantation without there having been an affirmation to recant.

  ‘So now we understand each other. I am very glad. I have brought you some flowers from my little garden: Sister is putting them in water. They should brighten your darkness a little. I hope you will soon feel able to return to the community. I shall keep myself informed of your well-being, naturally.’

  The French papers were written paragraph by slow paragraph. Emily’s pen made dry, black, running little marks on the white paper: Emily’s argument threaded itself, a fine line embellished by bright beads of quotations. She did not make it up; she knew it, and recognized it, and laid it out in its ordered pattern. Between paragraphs Emily saw, in the dark corners of the school hall, under dusty shields of honour, little hallucinatory scenes or tableaux, enacting in doorways and window embrasures a charade of the aimlessness of endeavour. She wrote a careful analysis of the clarity of the exposition of Phèdre’s devious and confused passion and looked up to see creatures gesticulating on the fringed edge of her consciousness like the blown ghosts trying to pass over the Styx. She saw Miss Crichton-Walker, silvery-muddy, as she had been in the underwater blind-light of the nursery, gravely indicating that failure had its purpose for her. She saw Aunt Florrie, grey and faded and resigned amongst the light thrown off the white linen cloths and immaculate bridal satins of her work, another judge, upright in her chair. She saw Martin, of whom she thought infrequently, on an occasion when he had gleefully tossed and rumpled all the papers spread on her little table, mild, solid, uncomprehending flesh among falling sheets of white. She saw even the long racks of ghost-glazed, unbaked pots, their pattern hidden beneath the blurred film of watery clay, waiting to go into the furnace of her father’s kiln and be cooked into pleasantly clean and shining transparency. Why go on, a soft voice said in her inner ear, what is all this fuss about? What do you know, it asked justly enough, of incestuous maternal passion or the anger of the gods? These are not our concerns: we must make tablecloths and endure. Emily knew about guilt, Miss Crichton-Walker had seen to that, but she did not know about desire, bridled or unbridled, the hooked claws of flame in the blood. She wrote a neat and eloquent paragraph about Phèdre’s always-present guilt, arching from the first scene to the end, which led her to feel terror at facing Minos her father, judge of the Underworld, which led her ultimately to feel that the clarity of her vision dirtied the light air, the purity of daylight. From time to time, writing this, Emily touched nervously the puffed sacs under her swollen eyes: she was struggling through liquid, she could not help irrelevantly seeing Phèdre’s soiled clarity of gaze in terms of her own overwept, sore vision, for which the light was too much.

  In another place, the Reader walked in dry, golden air, in his separate desert, waiting to weigh her knowledge and her ignorance, to judge her order and her fallings-off. When Emily had finished her writing she made her bow to him, in her mind, and acknowledged that he was a mythical being, that it was not possible to live in his light.

  Who won, you will ask, Emily or Miss Crichton-Walker, since the Reader is mythical and detached, and can neither win nor lose? Emily might be thought to have won, since she had held to her purpose successfully: what she had written was not gibberish but exactly what was required by the scrupulous, checked and counter-checked examiners, so that her marks, when they came, were the highest the school had ever seen. Miss Crichton-Walker might be thought to have won, since Emily was diagnosed as having broken down, was sent home under strict injunctions not to open a book, and was provided by her mother with a piece of petit-point to do through the long summer, a Victorian pattern of blown roses and blue columbine, stretched across a gripping wooden hoop, in which she made dutiful cross after cross blunt-needled, tiny and woollen, pink, buff, crimson, sky-blue, royal blue, Prussian blue, creating on the underside a matted and uncouth weft of lumpy ends and trailing threads, since finishing off neatly was her weakest point. Emily might be thought to have won in the longer run, since she went to university indeed, from where she married young and hastily, having specialized safely in French language. If Emily herself thought that she had somehow lost, she thought this, as is the nature of things, in a fluctuating and intermittent way, feeling also a steady warmth towards her mild husband, a tax inspector, and her two clever daughters, and beyond that a certain limited satisfaction in the translation work she did part-time for various international legal bodies.

  One day, however, she was called to see the deputy head of her eldest daughter’s school, a shining steel and glass series of cubes and prisms, very different from her own dark, creeper-covered place of education. The deputy head was birdlike, insubstantial and thin in faded denim; his thin grey hair was wispy on his collar; his face was full of mild concern as he explained his anxieties about Emily’s daughter. You must try to understand, he told Emily, that just because you are middle-class and university-educated, you need not expect your daughter to share your priorities. I have told Sarah myself that if she wants to be a gardener we shall do everything we can to help her, that her life is her own, that everything all the girls do here is of great importance to us, it all matters equally, all we want is for them to find themselves. Emily said in a small, dull voice that what Sarah wanted was to be able to do advanced French and advanced maths and that she could not really believe that the school had found this impossible to timetable and arrange. The deputy head’s expression became extensively gentler and at the same time judicially set. You must allow, he told Emily, that parents are not always the best judge of their child’s aptitudes. You may very well – with the best of intentions, naturally – be confusing Sarah’s best interests with your own unfulfilled ambitions. Sarah may not be an academic child. Emily dared not ask him, as she should have done, as furious Sarah, frustrated and rebellious, was expecting her to do, if he knew Sarah, on what he was founding this judgment. Sarah’s French, she said, is very good indeed; it is my subject, I know. She has a natural gift. He smiled his thin disbelief, his professional dismissal, and said that was her view, but not necessarily the school’s. We are here to educate the whole human being, he told Emily, to educate her for life, for forming personal relations, running a home, finding her place in society, understanding her responsibilities. We are very much aware of Sarah’s needs and problems – one of which, if I may speak frankly, is your expectations. Perhaps you should try to trust us? In any case, it is absolutely impossible to arrange the timetable so that Sarah may do both maths and French.

  That old mild voice sounded through this new one: Emily walked away through the glassy-chill corridors thinking that if it had not been for that earlier authority she would have defied this one, wanting to stone the huge, silent panes of glass and let the dry light through, despising her own childishness.

  At home, Sarah drew a neat double line under a geometric proof, laid out for the absent scanning of an unfalteringly accurate mind, to whose presence she required access. What Sarah made of herself, what Sarah saw, is Sarah’s story. You can believe, I hope, you can afford to believe, that she made her way into its light.

  MARTIN AMIS

  Career Move

  When Alistair finished his new screenplay, Offensive from Quasar 13, he submitted it to the LM, and waited. Over the past year, he had had more than a dozen screenplays rejected by the Little Magazine. On the other hand, his most recent submission, a batch of five, had been returned
not with the standard rejection slip but with a handwritten note from the screenplay editor, Hugh Sixsmith. The note said:

  I was really rather taken with two or three of these, and seriously tempted by Hotwire, which I thought close to being fully achieved. Do please go on sending me your stuff.

  Hugh Sixsmith was himself a screenplay writer of considerable, though uncertain, reputation. His note of encouragement was encouraging. It made Alistair brave.

  Boldly he prepared Offensive from Quasar 13 for submission. He justified the pages of the typescript with fondly lingering fingertips. Alistair did not address the envelope to the Screenplay Editor. No. He addressed it to Mr Hugh Sixsmith. Nor, for once, did he enclose his curriculum vitae, which he now contemplated with some discomfort. It told, in a pitiless staccato, of the screenplays he had published in various laptop broadsheets and comically obscure pamphlets; it even told of screenplays published in his university magazine. The truly disgraceful bit came at the end, where it said ‘Rights Offered: First British Serial only.’

  Alistair spent a long time on the covering note to Sixsmith – almost as long as he had spent on Offensive from Quasar 13. The note got shorter and shorter the more he worked on it. At last he was satisfied. There in the dawn he grasped the envelope and ran his tongue across its darkly luminous cuff.

  That Friday, on his way to work, and suddenly feeling completely hopeless, Alistair surrendered his parcel to the sub-post office in Calchalk Street, off the Euston Road. Deliberately – very deliberately – he had enclosed no stamped-addressed envelope. The accompanying letter, in its entirety, read as follows: ‘Any use? If not – w.p.b.’

  ‘W.p.b.’ stood, of course, for ‘waste-paper basket’ – a receptacle that loomed forbiddingly large in the life of a practising screenplay writer. With a hand on his brow, Alistair sidled his way out of there – past the birthday cards, the tensed pensioners, the envelopes, and the balls of string.

  When Luke finished the new poem – entitled, simply, ‘Sonnet’ – he xeroxed the printout and faxed it to his agent. Ninety minutes later he returned from the gym downstairs and prepared his special fruit juice while the answering machine told him, among many other things, to get back to Mike. Reaching for an extra lime, Luke touched the preselect for Talent International.

  ‘Ah. Luke,’ said Mike. ‘It’s moving. We’ve already had a response.’

  ‘Yeah, how come? It’s four in the morning where he is.’

  ‘No, it’s eight in the evening where he is. He’s in Australia. Developing a poem with Peter Barry.’

  Luke didn’t want to hear about Peter Barry. He bent, and tugged off his tank top. Walls and windows maintained a respectful distance – the room was a broad seam of sun haze and river light. Luke sipped his juice: its extreme astringency caused him to lift both elbows and give a single, embittered nod. He said, ‘What did he think?’

  ‘Joe? He did backflips. It’s “Tell Luke I’m blown away by the new poem. I just know that ‘Sonnet’ is really going to happen.”” ’

  Luke took this coolly. He wasn’t at all old but he had been in poetry long enough to take these things coolly. He turned. Suki, who had been shopping, was now letting herself into the apartment, not without difficulty. She was indeed cruelly encumbered. Luke said, ‘You haven’t talked numbers yet. I mean like a ballpark figure.’

  Mike said, ‘We understand each other. Joe knows about Monad’s interest. And Tim at TCT.’

  ‘Good,’ said Luke. Suki was wandering slenderly towards him, shedding various purchases as she approached – creels and caskets, shining satchels.

  ‘They’ll want you to go out there at least twice,’ said Mike. ‘Initially to discuss … They can’t get over it that you don’t live there.’

  Luke could tell that Suki had spent much more than she intended. He could tell by the quality of patience in her sigh as she began to lick the sweat from his shoulderblades. He said, ‘Come on, Mike. They know I hate all that L.A. crap.’

  On his way to work that Monday Alistair sat slumped in his bus seat, limp with ambition and neglect. One fantasy was proving especially obdurate: as he entered his office, the telephone on his desk would actually be bouncing on its console – Hugh Sixsmith, from the Little Magazine, his voice urgent but grave, with the news that he was going to rush Alistair’s screenplay into the very next issue. (To be frank, Alistair had had the same fantasy the previous Friday, at which time, presumably, Offensive from Quasar 13 was still being booted round the floor of the sub-post office.) His girlfriend, Hazel, had come down from Leeds for the weekend. They were so small, he and Hazel, that they could share his single bed quite comfortably – could sprawl and stretch without constraint. On the Saturday evening, they attended a screenplay reading at a bookshop on Camden High Street. Alistair hoped to impress Hazel with his growing ease in this milieu (and managed to exchange wary leers with a few shambling, half-familiar figures – fellow screenplay writers, seekers, knowers). But these days Hazel seemed sufficiently impressed by him anyway, whatever he did. Alistair lay there the next morning (her turn to make tea), wondering about this business of being impressed. Hazel had impressed him mightily, seven years ago, in bed: by not getting out of it when he got into it. The office telephone rang many times that Monday, but none of the callers had anything to say about Offensive from Quasar 13. Alistair sold advertising space for an agricultural newsletter, so his callers wanted to talk about creosote admixes and offal reprocessors.

  He heard nothing for four months. This would normally have been a fairly good sign. It meant, or it might mean, that your screenplay was receiving serious, even agonized, consideration. It was better than having your screenplay flopping back on the mat by return post. On the other hand, Hugh Sixsmith might have responded to the spirit and the letter of Alistair’s accompanying note and dropped Offensive from Quasar 13 into his waste-paper basket within minutes of its arrival: four months ago. Rereading his fading carbon of the screenplay, Alistair now cursed his own (highly calibrated) insouciance. He shouldn’t have said, ‘Any use? If not – w.p.b.’ He should have said, ‘Any use? If not – s.a.e.’! Every morning he went down the three flights of stairs – the mail was there to be shuffled and dealt. And every fourth Friday, or thereabouts, he still wrenched open his LM, in case Sixsmith had run the screenplay without letting him know. As a surprise.

  ‘Dear Mr Sixsmith,’ thought Alistair as he rode the train to Leeds. ‘I am thinking of placing the screenplay I sent you elsewhere. I trust that … I thought it only fair to …’ Alistair retracted his feet to accommodate another passenger. ‘My dear Mr Sixsmith: In response to an inquiry from … In response to a most generous inquiry, I am putting together a selection of my screenplays for …’ Alistair tipped his head back and stared at the smeared window. ‘For Mudlark Books. It seems that the Ostler Press is also interested. This involves me in some paperwork, which, however tedious … For the record … Matters would be considerably eased … Of course if you …’

  Luke sat on a Bauhaus love seat in Club World at Heathrow, drinking Evian and availing himself of the complimentary fax machine – clearing up the initial paperwork on the poem with Mike.

  Everyone in Club World looked hushed and grateful to be there, but not Luke, who looked exhaustively displeased. He was flying first class to LAX, where he would be met by a uniformed chauffeur who would convey him by limousine or courtesy car to the Pinnacle Trumont on the Avenue of the Stars. First class was no big thing. In poetry, first class was something you didn’t need to think about. It wasn’t discussed. It was statutory. First class was just business as usual.

  Luke was tense: under pressure. A lot – maybe too much – was riding on ‘Sonnet’. If ‘Sonnet’ didn’t happen, he would soon be able to afford neither his apartment nor his girlfriend. He would recover from Suki before very long. But he would never recover from not being able to afford her, or his apartment. If you wanted the truth, his deal on ‘Sonnet’ was not that great. Luke was furious with
Mike except about the new merchandizing clause (potential accessories on the poem – like toys or T-shirts) and the improved cut he got on tertiaries and sequels. Then there was Joe.

  Joe calls, and he’s like, ‘We really think “Sonnet”” ’s going to work, Luke. Jeff thinks so too. Jeff’s just come in. Jeff? It’s Luke. Do you want to say something to him? Luke. Luke, Jeff’s coming over. He wants to say something about “Sonnet”.’

  ‘Luke?’ said Jeff. ‘Jeff. Luke? You’re a very talented writer. It’s great to be working on “Sonnet” with you. Here’s Joe.’

  ‘That was Jeff,’ said Joe. ‘He’s crazy about “Sonnet”.’

  ‘So what are we going to be talking about?’ said Luke. ‘Roughly.’

  ‘On “Sonnet”? Well, the only thing we have a problem on “Sonnet” with, Luke, so far as I can see, anyway, and I know Jeff agrees with me on this – right, Jeff? – and so does Jim, incidentally, Luke,’ said Joe, ‘is the form.’

  Luke hesitated. Then he said, ‘You mean the form “Sonnet”” ’s written in.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Luke. The sonnet form.’

  Luke waited for the last last call and was then guided, with much unreturned civility, into the plane’s nose.

  ‘Dear Mr Sixsmith,’ wrote Alistair,

  Going through my files the other day, I vaguely remembered sending you a little effort called Offensive from Quasar 13 – just over seven months ago, it must have been. Am I right in assuming that you have no use for it? I might bother you with another one (or two!) that I have completed since then. I hope you are well. Thank you so much for your encouragement in the past.

 

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