‘So you’ve forgotten about your horse,’ said Brenda softly from behind. She was up and standing back in the shadows of the room.
‘No, no, I have not!’ cried her cousin, ‘and if it happens again …’
‘What then?’ asked the other girl.
‘I’ll do something about it, of course.’
Her cousin said nothing, but smiled to herself as she dressed. It was hot that day. When they went out they found the wet garden steaming. Cascades of drops fell from the bushes as they brushed past. In the morning they roamed about in the woods behind the house, went up the hill with a picnic tea, and in the early evening came down to watch Brenda’s father dealing with his swarm of bees which hung from the low branch of a lime tree. Later when it was cooler he gathered the sizzling, brown bundle down into a basket and took them to the hive where he knocked them out cautiously onto the threshold. They knelt down to watch the regiment of bees move slowly up into their furious-sounding retreat. Then they went inside for supper – a rich fish pie with herbs from the garden. Brenda’s father was a handsome, heavy, easy-going man who laughed a lot. He talked about the history of the district, he talked about bees, about flowers, sunshine and honey. Late every evening he’d go off to drink, always returning, benign or belligerent by turns.
‘What about winter when there’s no more honey?’ Kate had asked him before he left.
‘In the winter I make a special syrup for my bees,’ he replied. ‘I make great cans of the stuff. It keeps them going till the sun comes out again.’
‘Yes, it’s the only time he’s ever inside the kitchen!’ exclaimed Brenda, laughing.
Her mother didn’t smile, but with a serious face kept plucking listlessly at the tablecloth. She looked so tired that Kate was only too glad to get up and go off with her cousin again.
‘Your mother doesn’t listen to your father,’ she said when they were outside. ‘She doesn’t really believe him.’
‘No, she doesn’t believe him,’ Brenda agreed. ‘She doesn’t believe the honey, sunshine bit. I wouldn’t know much about the early time, of course.’ Her mother had married later than most, she said. And then she’d worked too hard. One child every twenty months or so had knocked some of the verve and strength from her life.
‘I was told everyone helps everyone else here,’ said Kate. ‘Even the largest families. It goes right down through them all, and the oldest can help the youngest.’ All the same, there were days, Brenda had replied calmly, when her mother didn’t, simply couldn’t get up – not for the life of her. Then, naturally, she herself took over. No, she didn’t mind doing dishes, cooking, looking after the others. Not at all. But she didn’t think she would ever marry, she added.
‘That’s rubbish!’ said Kate. ‘With your looks, your intelligence.’
‘Absolutely nothing to do with it,’ said her cousin. ‘But it’s true I’ve got some talent like my mother.’
She described how her mother had been a true crafts-woman and had brought back some of the old Irish designs into her illuminated scripts and wall-hangings when she started to work on her own. There were tapestries too, unlike anything that had been seen here before. They had got into exhibitions. One or two had been sent abroad and made a good deal of money. That meant her mother could occasionally go away for longer, visit foreign galleries, sell her work more widely.
‘Why doesn’t she go on with it then?’ asked Kate.
Her cousin laughed at the innocence of this question, or was it stupidity? Sometimes these were very close to one another, she thought, as she stared at Kate’s placid face. ‘You don’t know much, do you? And you’ve seen absolutely nothing,’ she went on, stretching herself as if the whole subject made her tired and stiff. ‘And you’re so romantic, it’s positively cruel,’ she added. Kate couldn’t believe that cruelty and romance could ever be spoken about in the same breath. Cruelty was a horse with rolling eyes and froth on its lips. Romance was two boys staring up at a window, and the sound of bees on a summer evening. ‘Sleep well then,’ were Brenda’s last words that night. ‘And remember!’ Her cousin was almost asleep and so full of the sound of bees, the melting honeycomb and the sun that she couldn’t remember what this command might mean.
But in the morning came the cruel awakening. Brenda aroused her cousin with a shout and Kate ran to the window. The coughing, knock-kneed horse went shambling by, the tilting cans clattering. The driver was brandishing his whip. At the back of the room Brenda was sitting bolt upright in bed. ‘Do something!’ she cried.
‘Stop that! Stop!’ shouted Kate from the open window. The sunlight was already bright outside. A few shopkeepers were standing at their doors. Otherwise the street seemed unnaturally empty and as sharply focused on man and animal as a snapshot. It was silent too in the country beyond, so silent that every distant sound could be heard – even the early morning train taking people to their work in some far-out district. Kate drew in a deep breath. Oh, to be a brave actor in life rather than an observer! She leant out again. ‘Stop!’ she shouted down.
The driver looked directly up at the girl. A wide, tilted hat cast a sharp, black angle across his face, but his white teeth flashed a smile. He swept off his hat in a mocking gesture as he galloped past. He cracked the whip again. ‘Sorry, sweetheart, but I can’t stop today,’ he yelled. ‘This old mare won’t let me!’ The stumbling hoofs approached the corner. The frenzied animal went on and disappeared.
Kate sat down on her bed in tears. ‘Well, you didn’t do much, did you?’ said her cousin. ‘No use crying about it. Maybe you’ll get another chance.’ In a few minutes the schoolboys would be coming down the street. Even Brenda felt the anticipation of joy and tried to bring it back for Kate’s sake. Now there was a faint whistling and laughter under the window. ‘Your friends!’ she exclaimed in an encouraging voice. But Kate still sat on the bed, shivering, as if a wintry gust had caught her in midsummer. All sweetness of the momentary romance had suddenly disappeared. Nightmare was galloping through the bright day. Under her window the innocent milk had been spilt around and was trickling slowly through the dust.
This was Kate’s last morning before flying home. They spent it happily enough, and in the afternoon her cousin accompanied her to the station where she would catch the train to Dublin.
‘Till next autumn then,’ said Kate as her train approached. She drew near to kiss her cousin. Brenda seemed to draw back for an instant, cool and unsmiling. ‘Next year’s visit might have to be postponed,’ she said. ‘There may be another baby in the family.’ Kate was asking questions now, smiling and looking eagerly into her cousin’s impassive face. ‘I don’t want to talk too much about it now,’ Brenda explained, ‘in case something happens. My mother isn’t strong, and she’s not so young, you know.’ It was obvious Kate didn’t know. There was a slight touch of scorn in Brenda’s eyes as she said goodbye. Her cousin got up quickly into the train. A gap opened between them now – a gap which was more than the dark, sharpedged drop between train and platform. For the first time Kate experienced sorrow and fear of this wounding gash. On the platform Brenda was standing very straight and still. She looked suddenly thinner, harder and older as if she came from a country more mysterious, unexplored, and much more complex than her cousin had ever imagined. When the train started to move Kate leaned out and waved with a gentle, reassuring gesture. But Brenda held her arm straight up without waving. Indeed it seemed a salute rather than a wave and before the train left the station she had turned swiftly on her heel and disappeared.
About the Author
THE MAN WHO WANTED TO SMELL BOOKS
AND OTHER STORIES
Born in Kilmarnock in 1919 to a Scottish father and a Canadian mother, Elspeth Dryer spent the early years of her childhood in England. When she was nine her parents returned to Scotland and she continued her schooling at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh. From there she went to study Fine Arts, English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University before movin
g to Edinburgh College of Art where she took a Diploma in Art. After graduating she taught painting for several years in the Borders, Aberdeen and Northern Ireland. She married the philosopher George Elder Davie in 1944 (he was teaching at Queen’s University Belfast) and a daughter was born to them in 1946.
The family returned to Scotland and settled in Edinburgh which provided the scene and the material for much of Elspeth Davie’s writing from then on, with her perceptive eye for the disturbing nuances of apparently banal and everyday happenings. Davie had written short stories as a teenager, but her first book was a novel, Providings, published in 1965. Her second book was a collection called The Spark and Other Stories (1968). Three more novels were published over the years; Creating a Scene (1971) which deals with teaching art and received a Scottish Arts Council Award; Climbers on a Stair (1978) and Coming to Light (1989). But it was Elspeth Davie’s short fiction which brought her particular success with readers and critics alike, and her stories appeared in The London Magazine, Cornhill, Transatlantic Review and numerous anthologies. She received another Scottish Arts Council Award in 1977 and the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1978. Her stories appeared in The High Tide Talker and Other Stories (1976), The Night of the Funny Hats (1980), A Traveller’s Room (1985) and Death of a Doctor and Other Stories (1992). Elspeth Davie died in 1995.
Copyright
First published as a Canongate Classic in 2001
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
The stories in this selection were first published in volume form as follows: ‘Family House’, ‘The Spark’ and ‘A Visit to the Zoo’ in The Spark and other stories (Calder and Boyars, 1968); ‘The Snow Heart’, ‘The Colour’, ‘Waiting for the Sun’, ‘Allergy’, ‘The High Tide Talker’ and ‘The Bookstall’ in The High Tide Talker and other stories (Hamish Hamilton, 1976); ‘The Night of the Funny Hats’, ‘Pedestrian’, ‘The Time-Keeper’, ‘Concerto’ and ‘The Swans’ from The Night of the Funny Hats (Hamish Hamilton, 1980); ‘Lines’, ‘Security’, ‘A Field in Space’, ‘Out of Order’, ‘Bulbs’, ‘Shoe in the Sand’, ‘Couchettes’, ‘Thorns and Gifts’ and ‘Accompanists’ from A Traveller’s Room (Hamish Hamilton, 1985); ‘Death of a Doctor’, ‘The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books’, ‘Choirmaster’, ‘Through the Forest’ and ‘The Morning Mare’ from Death of a Doctor and other stories (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992)
‘Family House’, ‘The Spark’ and ‘A Visit to the Zoo’ copyright
© The Calder Educational Trust, reproduced by permission
Copyright © Elspeth Davie 1968, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1985, 1992
This selection copyright © Estate of Elspeth Davie, 2001
Introduction copyright © Giles Gordon, 2001
The 28 stories in this volume are printed more or
less in order of when they were written, and in the order
in which they were first published in volume form
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general
subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards
the Canongate Classics series and a specific
grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 497 5
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The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Page 38
