by D. J. Taylor
Drinking her coffee and looking out over the square, she wished that she could separate the critical apparatus she brought to her professional life from the world that extended beyond it. The people who wrote those poems for Violet – if they did write them – would be doing so with the best intentions. The last thing they needed was some bright, merciless intelligence criticising their scansion. There were not many things she envied in her son, but one of them, she thought, was the ability to live your life as it happened, without the eternal critic, that metaphorical F.R. Leavis or John Carey perched on your shoulder. Just as she was thinking that Lily Chen’s inadequacies were probably not, or not entirely, Lily Chen’s fault, that vast external forces that Lily Chen had no way of resisting had probably brought her here on this magic carpet ride from the mysterious East, she realised that the girl sitting ten yards away behind the copy of Closer was, as a certain part of her consciousness had already hinted to her, indeed Lily Chen. Lily Chen, whose knowledge of the Bloomsbury Group was as full of holes as a Jarlsberg cheese, but who had in some grotesque and unfortunate way apparently been pawed over by Graham Jamieson. You could not, Amy decided, deny someone the moral support they needed because of their ignorance of Virginia Woolf. You could not even deny it because you disliked them, or you suspected that they disliked you. In her mind she was back in the shop in the Camden square, where fierce old faces looked out of the frames of Victorian paintings, trying, and, as she suspected, failing to say the right thing, not even sure that the right thing could be said. Was there a right thing to be said here? Who knew? Coffee cup rattling in its saucer, the copy of Closer flapping before her like some ancient guerdon rallying a troop of medieval soldiery on their hill, she moved hesitantly, but hopefully, forward, in search of some elemental solidarity that had once existed in her life but had since gone missing from it, that ancient wonderland where moral feeling was simply moral feeling, babies lay uncontaminated in their cradles, and lakeland water flowed on undisturbed.
—2014
Acknowledgements
Of the stories included here, ‘Jermyn Street’ was first published in Nicholas Royle, ed. Neon Lit: Time Out Book of New Writing 2 (1999). ‘As Long as He Lies Perfectly Still’ appeared in the Independent on Sunday. ‘Charcoal’ was published in the Sunday Express Magazine. ‘Wrote for Luck’ was broadcast on BBC Radio Four and appeared in the Literary Review. ‘Teeny-weeny Little World’ and ‘Blow-ins’ were broadcast on BBC Radio Four and appeared in the Eastern Daily Press. ‘The Disappointed’ was published in Nicholas Royle, ed. The Agony and the Ecstasy: Short Stories and New Writing in Celebration of the World Cup (1998). ‘Rainy Season’ was broadcast on BBC Radio Four. ‘Passage Migrants’ was broadcast on BBC Radio Four and appeared in Pretext. ‘Birthday Lunch’ was published in S magazine. ‘Cranked Up Really High’ appeared in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine.
I should like to acknowledge the help and encouragement of the various editors and producers who originally commissioned or accepted these stories, in particular Nicholas Royle, Suzi Feay, Christie Hickman, Nancy Sladek, Trevor Heaton, Ali Smith and Julia Bell. Especial thanks are due to Sam Jordison, Eloise Millar and Henry Layte, without whose kind invitation this collection would not have existed.
About the Author
D.J. TAYLOR is the author of eleven novels, including English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Kept: a Victorian Mystery (2006), a Publishers’ Weekly book of the year and The Windsor Faction (2013), joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. His non-fiction includes After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945 (1993), Thackeray (1999) and Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for biography. He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three sons.
Also By D.J. Taylor
FICTION
Great Eastern Land
Real Life
English Settlement
After Bathing at Baxter’s: Stories
Trespass
The Comedy Man
Kept: A Victorian Mystery
Ask Alice
At the Chime of a City Clock
Derby Day
Secondhand Daylight
The Windsor Faction
From the Heart
NON-FICTION
A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s
Other People: Portraits from the ’90s (with Marcus Berkmann)
After the War: The Novel and England since 1945
Thackeray
Orwell: The Life
On the Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism and Sport
Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940
What You Didn’t Miss: A Book of Literary Parodies
Copyright
All rights reserved, © D.J. Taylor, 2015
The right of D.J. Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
The Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978–1–910296–25–7
Original Text designed and typeset by Tetragon, London