The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  She didn’t really want the child around. But Robyn was part of the price she paid for having been singled out by the professor among the girls in the faculty office at King’s College London, having married him and moved with him to begin a new life in the North. There had been some quarrel or other with King’s; he had enemies there.

  As the week wore on, she grew sick of the sound of her own voice jollying Robyn along. The girl hadn’t even brought any toys with her, to occupy her time. After a while, Valerie noticed that, when no one was looking, she played with two weird little figures, scraps of cloth tied into shapes with wool, one in each hand, doing the voices almost inaudibly. One voice was coaxing and hopeful, the other one reluctant. “Put on your special gloves,” one of them said. “But I don’t like the blue color,” said the other. “These ones have special powers,” the first voice persisted. “Try them out.”

  Valerie asked Robyn if these were her dollies. Shocked out of her fantasy, she hid the scraps behind her back. “Not really,” she said.

  “What are their names?”

  “They don’t have names.”

  “We could get out my sewing machine and make clothes for them.”

  Robyn shook her head, alarmed. “They don’t need clothes.”

  Selena had made them for her, she told Valerie, who worked out that Selena must have been their cleaner. “She doesn’t come anymore,” Robyn added, though not as if she minded particularly. “We sacked her. She stole things.”

  When Valerie tied her into an apron and stood her on a chair to make scones, Robyn’s fingers went burrowing into the flour as if they were independent of her, mashing the butter into lumps in her hot palms. “Like this,” Valerie said, showing her how to lift the flour as she rubbed, for lightness. Playfully, she grabbed at Robyn’s fingers under the surface of the flour, but Robyn snatched them back, dismayed, and wouldn’t try the scones when they were baked. Valerie ended up eating them, although she was trying to watch her weight, sticking to Ryvita and cottage cheese for lunch. She didn’t want to run to fat, like her mother. She thought Gil refused to visit her mother partly because he worried about how Valerie might look one day, when she wasn’t soft and fresh and blond anymore.

  Robyn had hardly brought enough clothes to last the week—besides the dress with the buttons, there was only a gray skirt that looked like a school uniform, a ribbed nylon jumper, one spare pair of knickers, odd socks, and a full-length nightdress made of red wool flannel, like something out of a storybook. The nightdress smelled of wee and Valerie thought it must be itchy; she took Robyn shopping for sensible pajamas and then they had tea at the cafeteria in British Home Stores, which had been Valerie’s treat when she was Robyn’s age. Robyn didn’t want a meringue but asked if she was allowed to hold her new pajamas, then sat with the cellophane package in her lap and an expression of conscious importance. The pajamas were white, decorated with yellow-and-blue yachts and anchors. “Can I keep them?” she asked tentatively, after a long, dull silence. Valerie had grown tired of chatting away inanely to no one.

  She had been going to suggest that Robyn leave the pajamas behind, for the next time she visited, but she didn’t really care. Every child ought to want something; it was only healthy. And, packed into Robyn’s suitcase along with the rest of her clothes—all freshly washed, apart from the dress, and pressed, even the socks, with Valerie’s steam iron—the pajamas would be like a message, a coded reproach, for that mother in Chelsea. She imagined Marise unpacking them in some room of flowery frivolity she couldn’t clearly visualize and feeling a pang for the insufficiency of her own maternal care. Valerie knew, though, that her parade of competence and righteous indignation was a lie, really. Because the truth was that she couldn’t wait for Robyn to go home. She longed to be free of that dogged, unresponsive little figure following her everywhere around the house.

  * * *

  —

  Gil was supposed to be driving Robyn back down to London on Wednesday. On Tuesday evening, when he came home early, Valerie knew right away that something was up. He stood behind her while she was preparing meat loaf at the kitchen counter, nuzzling under her ear and stroking her breast with one hand, determinedly jiggling the ice cubes in his Scotch with the other. He always poured himself a generous Scotch as soon as he came in: she’d learned not to comment. “You’re so good to me,” he said pleadingly, his voice muffled in her neck. “I don’t deserve it.”

  “Oh dear, what’s Mr. Naughty’s little game now?” Valerie was long-suffering, faintly amused, swiping onions from her chopping board into a bowl with the side of her knife. “What’s he sniffing after? He wants something.”

  “He knows he’s so selfish. Causes her no end of trouble.”

  These were two of the roles they acted out sometimes: Valerie brusquely competent and in charge, Gil wheedling and needy. There was a truth behind their performances, as well as pretense. Gil groaned apologetically. A problem had come up at work tomorrow, a special guest coming to dinner at High Table, someone he needed to meet because he had influence and the whole game was a bloody conspiracy. He’d never be able to get back from London in time. And Thursday was no good, either—faculty meeting; Friday he was giving a talk in Manchester. They could keep Robyn until Saturday, but the She-Bitch would never let him hear the end of it. He wanted Valerie to take her home tomorrow on the train. Valerie could stay over with her mother in Acton, couldn’t she? Come back the following day?

  Valerie had counted on being free in the morning, getting the house back to normal, having her thoughts to herself again, catching a bus into town perhaps, shopping. She was gasping for her solitude like a lungful of clean air. Biting her lower lip to keep herself from blurting out a protest, she kneaded onions into the minced meat; the recipe came from a magazine—it was seasoned with allspice and tomato ketchup. Certainly she didn’t fancy three extra days with the kid moping around. She thought, with a flush of outrage, that Gil was truly selfish, never taking her needs into consideration. On the other hand, important men had to be selfish in order to get ahead. She understood that—she wouldn’t have wanted a softer man who wasn’t respected. She could squeeze concessions out of him anyway, in return for this favor. Perhaps she’d ring up one of her old girlfriends, meet for coffee in Oxford Street, or even for a gin in a pub, for old times’ sake. She could buy herself something new to wear; she had saved up some money that Gil didn’t know about, out of the housekeeping.

  Theatrically, she sighed. “It’s very inconvenient. I was going to go into Jones’s, to make inquiries about these curtains for the sitting room.”

  He didn’t even correct her and tell her to call it the drawing room.

  “He’s sorry, he’s really sorry. It isn’t fair, he knows it. But it could be a little holiday for you. You could just put Robyn into a cab at the station, give the driver the address, let her mother pay. Why shouldn’t she? She’s got money.”

  Valerie was startled that he could even think she’d do that. The child could hardly get herself dressed in the mornings; she certainly wasn’t fit to be knocking halfway around London by herself, quarreling with cabdrivers. And, anyway, if Valerie really was going all the way to London, she might as well have a glimpse of where her stepdaughter lived. She was afraid of Marise, but curious about her, too.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the front door in Chelsea, Valerie stood holding Robyn’s suitcase in one leather-gloved hand and her own overnight bag in the other. The house was grand and dilapidated, set back from the street in an overgrown garden, with a flight of stone steps rising to a scruffy pillared portico, a broad door painted black. Names in faded, rain-stained ink were drawing-pinned beside a row of bells; they’d already rung twice, and Valerie’s feet were like ice. The afternoon light was thickening gloomily under the evergreens. Robyn stood uncomplaining in her thin coat, although from time to time on their jo
urney Valerie had seen her quake with the cold as if it had probed her, bypassing her conscious mind, like a jolt of electricity. The heating had been faulty on the train. While Valerie read her magazines and Robyn worked dutifully through one page after another in her coloring book, the washed-out, numb winter landscape had borne cruelly in on them from beyond the train window: miles of bleached, tufted dun grasses, purple-black tangled labyrinths of bramble, clumps of dark reeds frozen in a ditch. Valerie had been relieved when they got into the dirty old city at last. She hadn’t taken to the North, though she was trying.

  Staring up at the front door, Robyn had her usual stolidly neutral look, buffered against expectation; she hardly seemed excited by the prospect of seeing her mother again. And, when the door eventually swung open, a young man about Valerie’s age—with long fair hair and a flaunting angel face, dark-stubbled jaw, dead cigarette stuck to the wet of his sagging lip—looked out at them without any recognition. “Oh, hullo?” he said.

  With his peering, dozy eyes, he seemed to have only just got out of bed, or to be about to slop back into it. He was bursting out of his tight clothes: a shrunken T-shirt exposed a long hollow of skinny brown belly and a slick line of dark hairs, leading down inside pink satin hipster trousers. His feet were bare and sprouted with more hair, and he smelled like a zoo animal, of something sour and choking. Realization dawned when he noticed Robyn. “Hullo!” he said, as if it were funny. “You’re the little girl.”

  “Is Mrs. Hope at home?” Valerie asked stiffly.

  He scratched his chest under the T-shirt and his smile slid back to dwell on her, making her conscious of her breasts, although he only quickly flicked his glance across them. “Yeah, somewhere.”

  A woman came clattering downstairs behind him and loomed across his shoulder; she was taller than he was, statuesque, her glittering eyes black with makeup, and diamonds glinting in the piled-up mass of her dark hair, in the middle of the afternoon. Though, of course, the diamonds were paste—it was all a joke, a pantomime send-up. Valerie wasn’t such a fool, she got hold of that. Still, Marise was spectacular in a long, low-cut white dress and white patent-leather boots: she had an exaggerated, coarse beauty, like a film star blurred from being too much seen.

  “Oh, Christ, is it today? Shit! Is that the kid?” Marise wailed, pushing past the young man, her devouring eyes snatching off an impression of Valerie in one scouring instant and dismissing it. “I forgot all about it. It can’t be Wednesday already! Welcome home, honeypot. Give Mummy a million, million kisses. Give Jamie kisses. This is Jamie. Say hello. Isn’t he sweet? Don’t you remember him? He’s in a band.”

  Robyn said hello, gazing at Jamie without much interest and not moving to kiss anyone. Her mother pounced in a cloud of perfume and carried her inside, calling back over her shoulder to Valerie in her husky voice, mistaking her for some kind of paid nanny, or pretending to. “Awfully kind of you. Are those her things? Do you want to drop her bags here in the hall? James can carry them up later. Do you have a cab? Or he can get you one. Oof, what a big, heavy girl you’re getting to be, Robby-bobby. Can you climb up on your own?”

  The hall was dim and high, lit by a feeble unshaded bulb; when determinedly Valerie followed after them, her heels echoed on black-and-white marble tiles. “Hello, Mrs. H.,” she sang out in her brightest telephone voice. “I’m the new Mrs. H. How nice to meet you.”

  Marise looked down at her from the curve of the staircase, where she was stooping over Robyn, setting her down. “Oh, I thought you might be. I thought he might have chosen someone like you.”

  “I’m hoping you’re going to offer us a cup of tea,” Valerie went on cheerfully. Of course Marise had known that she was bringing Robyn—Gil had telephoned last night to tell her. “Only we’re frozen stiff, the pair of us! The heating on the train wasn’t working.”

  “Do you take milk?” Marise wondered. “Because I don’t know if we have any milk.”

  “So long as it’s hot!”

  She submitted graciously when Jamie offered to take both bags, then was aware of his following her up the stairs, appraising her from behind, and thought that Marise was aware of it, too. A door on the first floor, with a pillared surround and a pediment, stood open. You could see how it had once opened onto the best rooms at the heart of the house: now it had its own Yale lock and was painted purple and orange. The lower panels were dented and splintered as if someone had tried to kick through them. In the enormous room beyond, there was a marble fireplace and a candelabra and floor-length windows hung with tattered yellow brocade drapes; the glass in a vast gilt mirror was so foxed that it didn’t double the perspective but closed it in, like a black fog. Valerie understood that, like the diamonds in Marise’s hair, this wasn’t really decaying aristocratic grandeur but an arty imitation of it. Marise led the way past a glass dome as tall as a man, filled with stuffed, faded hummingbirds and a staring, dappled fairground horse, its flaring nostrils painted crimson; Robyn flinched from the horse as if from an old enemy.

  In the next room, which was smaller, a log fire burned in a blackened grate beside a leather sofa, its cushions cracked and pale with wear. Jamie dropped the bags against a wall. Robyn and Valerie, shivering in their coats, hung over the white ash in the grate as if it might be lifesaving, while Marise hunted for milk in what must have been the kitchen next door, though it sounded cavernous. Jamie crouched to put on more logs, reaching his face toward the flame to reignite his rollie. The milk was off, Marise announced. There was a tin of tomato juice; wouldn’t everyone prefer Bloody Marys? Valerie said that might be just the thing, but knew she must pace herself and not let the drink put her at any disadvantage.

  The Bloody Marys when they came were strong, made with lots of Tabasco and ice and lemon and a stuffed olive on a stick: Marise said they were wonderfully nourishing, she lived on them. She even brought one—made without vodka, or only the tiniest teaspoonful—for Robyn, along with a packet of salted crisps, and she kissed her, pretending to gobble her up. Robyn submitted to the assault. “You’re lucky, I saved those for you specially. I know that little girls are hungry bears. Because Jamie’s a hungry bear, too—he eats everything. I’ll have to hide the food away, won’t I, if we want to keep any of it for you? Are you still my hungry bear, Bobbin?”

  Robyn went unexpectedly then into a bear performance, hunching her shoulders, crossing her eyes, snuffling and panting, scrabbling in the air with her hands curled up like paws, her face a blunt little snout, showing pointed teeth. They must have played this game before; Marise watched her daughter with distaste and pity, austerely handsome as a carved ship’s figurehead. For a moment, Robyn really was a scruffy, dull-furred, small brown bear, dancing joylessly to order. Valerie wouldn’t have guessed that the child had it in her, to enter so completely into a life other than her own. “Nice old bear,” she said encouragingly.

  “That’s quite enough of that, Bobby,” Marise said. “Most unsettling. Now, why don’t you go and play, darling? Take your crisps away before the Jamie-bear gets them.”

  Robyn returned into her ordinary self, faintly pink in the face. “Shall I show Auntie Valerie my bedroom?”

  Marise’s expression ripened scandalously. She stared wide-eyed between Robyn and Valerie. “ ‘Auntie Valerie’! What’s this? Valerie isn’t your real auntie, you know. Didn’t anyone explain to you?”

  “We thought it was the best thing for her to call me, considering,” Valerie said.

  “Well, I’m relieved you didn’t go in for ‘Mummy.’ Or ‘Dearest Mamma,’ or ‘Mom.’ ”

  Flustered, Robyn shot a guilty look at Valerie. “I do know she’s my stepmother, really.”

  “That’s better. Your wicked stepmother, don’t forget.” Marise winked broadly at Valerie. “Now, off you go. She doesn’t want to see your bedroom.”

  They heard her trail through the kitchen, open another door on the far s
ide, close it again behind her. The fire blazed up. Jamie began picking out something on his guitar while Marise rescued his rollie from the ashtray and fell with it onto the opposite end of the sofa. Valerie guessed that they were smoking pot—that was what the zoo smell was. And she thought that she ought to leave. There was nothing for her here—she had made her point by coming inside. “So, Valerie,” Marise said musingly. “How did you get on with my dear daughter? Funny little snake, isn’t she? I hope Gilbert enjoyed spending every moment with her, after all those protestations of how he’s such a devoted father. Was she a good girl?”

  “Awfully good. We didn’t have a squeak of trouble.”

  “I mean, isn’t she just a piece of Gilbert? Except not clever, of course. Poor little mite, with his looks and my brains.”

  Outside, the last of the afternoon light was being blotted out, and although wind buffeted the loose old windowpanes, no one stirred to draw the curtains or switch on the lamps. Valerie wanted to go, but the drink was stronger than she was used to, and the heat from the fire seemed to press her down in the sofa. Also, she feared returning through the next room, past the stuffed birds and that horse. She was imagining how her husband might have been impressed and excited once by this careless, shameless, disordered household. If you owned so much, you could afford to trample it underfoot in a grand gesture, turning everything into a game.