The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  But the delegates, sitting in the plenary session of the second International Conference, were still reluctant to take regulatory action. It was partly a case of heads-in-the-sand; it was – human nature being what it is – partly a matter of political advantage or commercial gain. There lingered, too, a somewhat surprising nostalgia for traditional liberties and for the old verbal order of the world. Discussion at the conference had gone around and around all week, pointless and wasteful, and it looked very much as though the final meeting would end in yet another welter of indecision and deferral. It was at that point that Ian, seated in the front row, rose and requested permission to speak.

  He was granted a one-minute slot on the agenda. In fact, he spoke for several minutes, but his eloquence, his sincerity (and no doubt his strong, boyish appearance, his shaggy hair and his blue eyes) seemed to merit an exception. Certainly not one person sitting in that gathering had any wish to stop him.

  It was unfortunate, tragic some thought, that a freak failure in the electronic system – only a plug accidentally pulled from its socket – prevented his exact words from being recorded, but those who were present remembered afterward how passionately he pleaded his love, for the planet. (In truth – though who could know this? – he was thinking chiefly of his love for Isobel and his two children.)

  We are living in a fool’s dream, he told his fellow delegates, and the time has come for us to wake. Voluntary restraints were no longer adequate to preserve the little earth, which was the only home we know. Halfway measures like the old three-hour temps tranquilles were next to useless since they were never, or almost never, enforced. The evening curfew-lingua was ridiculously lenient. Abuses of every sort abounded, particularly the use of highly percussive words or words that were redolent with emotional potency, even though it had been established that these two classes of words were particularly damaging to bedrock and shales. Multilingualism continued to flourish. Wasteful antiphonic structures were actually on the increase in the more heavily populated regions, as was the use of elaborate ceremonial metaphor. It was as though, by refusing to make linguistic sacrifices, the human race had willed its own destruction.

  When he finished speaking, the applause was prolonged and powerful. It perhaps held an element of shame, too; this young man had found the courage to say at last what should have been said long before. One after another the delegates rose to their feet, and soon their clapping fell into a steady rhythmic beat that had the effect of holding Ian hostage on the platform. The chairman whispered into his ear, begging him for a few additional words.

  He assented. He could not say no. And, in a fever that was remarkably similar to the fever he had suffered as a child during a severe case of measles, or like the fever of love he had succumbed to ten years earlier in Rome, he announced to the audience, holding up a hand for attention, that he would be the first to take a vow of complete silence for the sake of the planet that had fathered him.

  Almost at once he regretted his words, but hubris kept him from recanting for the first twenty-four hours and, after that, a kind of stubbornness took over. Isobel met him at the airport with the words, “You went too far.” Later, after a miserable, silent attempt at lovemaking, she said, “I’ll never forgive you.” His children, clamoring to hear about his moment of heroism, poked at him, at his face and chest and arms, as though he were inert. He tried to tell them with his eyes that he was still their father, that he still loved them.

  “Leave him alone,” Isobel said sharply. “He might as well be a stranger now. He’s no different than anyone else.”

  She became loud and shrewish. When his silent followers arrived at their door – and in time there were thousands of them, each with the same blank face and gold armband – she admitted them with bad grace. She grew garrulous. She rambled on and on, bitter and blaming, sometimes incoherent, sometimes obscene, sometimes reverting to a coarse, primitive schoolyard Spanish, sometimes shouting to herself or cursing into the mirror or chanting oaths – anything to furnish the emptiness of the house with words. She became disoriented. The solid plaster of the walls fell away from her, melting into a drift of vapor. There seemed to be no shadows, no sense of dimension, no delicate separation between one object and another. Privately, she pleaded with her husband for an act of apostasy. Later she taunted him. “Show me you’re still human,” she would say. “Give me just one word.” The word betrayal came frequently out of her wide mobile mouth, and so did the scornful epithet martyr.

  But time passes and people forget. She forgot, finally, what it was that had betrayed her. Next she forgot her husband’s name. Sometimes she forgot that she had a husband at all, for how could anything be said to exist, she asked herself loudly, hoarsely – even a husband, even one’s self – if it didn’t also exist in the shape of a word.

  He worried that she might be arrested, but for some reason – his position probably – she was always let off with a warning. In their own house she ignored him, passing him on the stairs without a look, or crossing in front of him as though he were a stuffed chair. Often she disappeared for hours, venturing out alone into the heat of the night, and he began to suspect she had taken a lover.

  The thought preyed on him, though, in fact he had long since forgotten the word for wife and also the word for fidelity. One night, when she left the house, he attempted to follow her, but clearly she was suspicious because she walked very quickly, looking back over her shoulder, making a series of unnecessary turns and choosing narrow old streets whose curbs were blackened by fire. Within minutes he lost sight of her; soon after that he was driven back by the heat.

  The next night he tried again, and this time he saw her disappear into an ancient dilapidated braiding, the sort of enclosure, he remembered, where children had once gone to learn to read and write. Unexpectedly, he felt a flash of pity, what a sad place for a tryst. He waited briefly, then entered the building and went up a flight of smoldering stairs that seemed on the point of collapse. There he found a dim corridor, thick with smoke, and a single room at one end.

  Through the door he heard a waterfall of voices. There must have been a dozen people inside, all of them talking. The talk seemed to be about poetry. Someone – a woman – was giving a lecture. There were interruptions, a discussion, some laughter. He heard his wife’s voice, her old gilt-edged contralto, asking a question, and the sound of it made him draw in his breath so sharply that something hard, like a cinder or a particle of gravel, formed in his throat.

  It stayed stubbornly lodged there all night. He found it painful to breathe, and even Isobel noticed how he thrashed about in bed, gasping wildly for air. In the morning she called a doctor, who could find nothing wrong, but she remained uneasy, and that evening she stayed home and made him cups of iced honey-and-lemon tea to ease his throat. He took her hand at one point and held it to his lips as though it might be possible to find the air he needed inside the crevices of her skin. By now the scraping in his throat had become terrible, a raw agonizing rasp like a dull knife sawing through limestone. She looked at his face, from which the healthy, blood-filled elasticity had gone, and felt herself brushed by a current of air, or what might have been the memory of a name.

  He began to choke violently, and she heard something grotesque come out of his mouth, a sound that was only half-human, but that rode on a curious rhythmic wave that for some reason stirred her deeply. She imagined it to be the word Isobel. “Isobel?” she asked, trying to remember its meaning. He said it a second time, and this time the syllables were more clearly formed.

  The light of terror came into his eyes, or perhaps the beginning of a new fever; she managed to calm him by stroking his arm. Then she called the children inside the house, locked the doors and windows against the unbearable heat, and they began, slowly, patiently, hands linked, at the beginning where they had begun before – with table, chair, bed, cool, else, other, sleep, face, mouth, breath, tongue.

  Revenge

  Anne Enright

>   Anne Enright (b. 1962) is an Irish author, born in Dublin. She has published essays, short stories, a work of non-fiction and four novels. Her novel, The Gathering, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

  I work for a firm which manufactures rubber gloves. There are many kinds of protective gloves, from the surgical and veterinary (arm-length) to industrial, gardening and domestic. They have in common a niceness. They all imply revulsion. You might not handle a dead mouse without a pair of rubber gloves, someone else might not handle a baby. I need not tell you that shops in Soho sell nuns’ outfits made of rubber, that some grown men long for the rubber under-blanket of their infancies, that rubber might save the human race. Rubber is a morally, as well as a sexually, exciting material. It provides us all with an elastic amnesty, to piss the bed, to pick up dead things, to engage in sexual practices, to not touch whomsoever we please.

  I work with and sell an everyday material, I answer everyday questions about expansion ratios, tearing, petrifaction, I moved from market research to quality control. I have snapped more elastic in my day etcetera etcetera.

  My husband and I are the kind of people who put small ads in the personal columns looking for other couples who may be interested in some discreet fun. This provokes a few everyday questions: How do people do that? What do they say to each other? What do they say to the couples who answer? To which the answers are: Easily. Very little. ‘We must see each other again sometime.’

  When I was a child it was carpet I loved. I should have made a career in floor-coverings. There was a brown carpet in the dining room with specks of black that was my parents’ pride and joy. ‘Watch the carpet!’ they would say, and I did. I spent all my time sitting on it, joining up the warm, black dots. Things mean a lot to me.

  The stench of molten rubber gives me palpitations. It also gives me eczema and a bad cough. My husband finds the smell anaphrodisiac in the extreme. Not even the products excite him, because after seven years you don’t know who you are touching, or not touching, anymore.

  My husband is called Malachy and I used to like him a lot. He was unfaithful to me in that casual, ‘look, it didn’t mean anything’ kind of way. I was of course bewildered, because that is how I was brought up. I am supposed to be bewildered. I am supposed to say, ‘What is love anyway? What is sex?’

  Once the fiction between two people snaps then anything goes, or so they say. But it wasn’t my marriage I wanted to save, it was myself. My head, you see, is a balloon on a string, my insides are elastic. I have to keep the tension between what is outside and what is in, if I am not to deflate, or explode.

  So it was more than a suburban solution that made me want to be unfaithful with my husband, rather than against him. It was more than a question of the mortgage. I had my needs too: a need to be held in, to be filled, a need for sensation. I wanted revenge and balance. I wanted an awfulness of my own. Of course it was also suburban. Do you really want to know our sexual grief? How we lose our grip, how we feel obliged to wear things, how we are supposed to look as if we mean it.

  Malachy and I laugh in bed, that is how we get over the problem of conviction. We laugh at breakfast too, on a good day, and sometimes we laugh again at dinner. Honest enough laughter, I would say, if the two words were in the same language, which I doubt. Here is one of the conversations that led to the ad in the personals:

  ‘I think we’re still good in bed.’ (LAUGH)

  ‘I think we’re great in bed.’ (LAUGH)

  ‘I think we should advertise.’ (LAUGH)

  Here is another:

  ‘You know John Jo at work? Well his wife was thirty-one yesterday. I said, “What did you give her for her birthday then?” He said, “I gave her one for every year. Beats blowing out candles.” Do you believe that?’(LAUGH)

  You may ask when did the joking stop and the moment of truth arrive? As if you didn’t know how lonely living with someone can be.

  The actual piece of paper with the print on is of very little importance. John Jo composed the ad for a joke during a coffee-break at work. My husband tried to snatch it away from him. There was a chase.

  There was a similar chase a week later when Malachy brought the magazine home to me. I shrieked. I rolled it up and belted him over the head. I ran after him with a cup full of water and drenched his shirt. There was a great feeling of relief, followed by some very honest sex. I said, ‘I wonder what the letters will say?’ I said, ‘What kind of couples do that kind of thing? What kind of people answer ads like that?’ I also said, ‘God, how vile!’

  Some of the letters had photos attached. ‘This is my wife.’ Nothing is incomprehensible, when you know that life is sad. I answered one for a joke. I said to Malachy, ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’

  I started off with mackerel pate, mackerel being a scavenger fish, and good for the heart. I followed with veal osso buco, for reasons I need not elaborate, and finished with a spiced fig pudding with rum butter. Both the eggs I cracked had double yolks, which I found poignant.

  I hoovered everything in sight of course. Our bedroom is stranger-proof. It is the kind of bedroom you could die in and not worry about the undertakers. The carpet is a little more interesting than beige, the spread is an ochre brown, die pattern on the curtains is expensive and unashamed. One wall is mirrored in a sanitary kind of way; with little handles for the wardrobe doors.

  ‘Ding Dong,’ said the doorbell. Malachy let them in. I heard the sound of coats being taken and drinks offered. I took off my apron, paused at the mirror and opened the kitchen door.

  Her hair was over-worked, I thought – too much perm and too much gel. Her make-up was shiny, her eyes were small. All her intelligence was in her mouth, which gave an ironic twist as she said hello. It was a large mouth, sexy and selfish. Malachy was holding out a gin and tonic for her in a useless kind of way.

  Her husband was concentrating on the ice in his glass. His suit was a green so dark it looked black – very discreet, I thought, and out of our league, with Malachy in his cheap polo and jeans. I didn’t want to look at his face, nor he at mine. In the slight crash of our glances I saw he was worn before his time.

  I think he was an alcoholic. He drank his way through the meal and was polite. There was a feeling that he was pulling back from viciousness. Malachy, on the other hand, was over-familiar. He and the wife laughed at bad jokes and their feet were confused under the table. The husband asked me about my job and I told him about the machine I have for testing rubber squares; how it pulls the rubber four different ways at high speed. I made it sound like a joke, or something. He laughed.

  I realised myself a slow, physical excitement, a kind of pornographic panic. It felt like the house was full of balloons pressing gently against the ceiling. I looked at the husband.

  ‘Is this your first time?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of people do this kind of thing?’ I asked, because I honestly didn’t know.

  ‘Well they usually don’t feed us so well, or even at all.’ I felt guilty. ‘This is much more civilised,’ he said. ‘A lot of them would be well on before we arrive, I’d say. As a general kind of rule.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t really drink.’

  ‘Listen,’ he leaned forward. ‘I was sitting having a G and T in someone’s front room and the wife took Maria upstairs to look at the bloody grouting in the bathroom or something, when this guy comes over to me and I realise about six minutes too late that he plays for bloody Arsenal! If you see what I mean. A very ordinary looking guy.

  ‘You have to be careful,’ he said. ‘And his wife was a cracker.’

  When I was a child I used to stare at things as though they knew something I did not. I used to put them into my mouth and chew them to find out what it was. I kept three things under my bed at night; a piece of wood, a metal door-handle and a cloth. I sucked them instead of my thumb.

  We climbed the stairs after Malachy and the wife, who were laughing. Malachy was away, I
couldn’t touch him. He had the same look in his eye as when he came home from a hurling match when the right team won.

  The husband was talking in a low, constant voice that I couldn’t refuse. I remember looking at the carpet, which had once meant so much to me. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing.

  I thought that we were all supposed to end up together and perform and watch and all that kind of thing. I was interested in the power it would give me over breakfast, but I wasn’t looking forward to the confusion. I find it difficult enough to arrange myself around one set of limbs, which are heavy things. I wouldn’t know what to do with three. Maybe we would get over the awkwardness with a laugh or two, but in my heart of hearts I didn’t find the idea of being with a naked woman funny. What would we joke about? Would we be expected to do things?