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

by Victoria Hislop

  The uneventful course of my life continues, nothing happens to break the monotony of the days. Sometime, I suppose, I may forget the leopard’s visit. As it is I seldom think of him, except at night when I’m waiting for sleep to come. But, very occasionally he still enters my dreams, which disturbs me and makes me feel restless and sad. Although I never remember the dreams when I wake, for days afterwards they seem to weigh me down with the obscure bitterness of a loss which should have been prevented, and for which I am myself to blame.

  Obsessional

  Anna Kavan

  Anna Kavan (1901–1968) was a British writer and painter. Having begun her career under her married name, Helen Ferguson, she suffered a nervous breakdown and became Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone. Suffering from long-term drug addiction and bouts of mental illness, Kavan’s life featured prominently in her work. She died of heart failure in 1968, soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, the novel Ice.

  It happened between nine and ten in the evening, his usual time. The inner door of the lobby suddenly opened, just as if he’d let himself in with his key, and she turned her head.

  The sheer, mad impossibility of his reappearing, now, all these months afterwards, did not check the instantaneous charge of purest joy that went through her like an electric shock. Many miracles had occurred in connection with him, and this could be one more, since cosmic rays and the mystery of mutation had committed them to each other – might they not come together without the body, and not only in dreams?

  Already, before her reasoning brain killed the illusion, the words of welcome took shape, her muscles tensed for the suddenly youthful springing up that would take her to meet him, hands outstretched to bring him quickly into the room. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come…’ Already, while in the act of turning, she’d seen his face crumpled in the hunted expression which always struck her as unbearably touching, though she could never decide if it was genuine or assumed, as he said with heart-tending humility – real or false, what did it matter?… ‘You must not be angry with me because I did not come to see you these last days. I wanted to come – but it has not been possible…’

  ‘Of course I’m not angry,’ she would answer. ‘All that matters is that you’re here now.’ And everything would be perfect and understood, any need for explanation, any hint of criticism or sadness past would fade out with his troubled expression, his mouth widening in the warm, amused smile of his usual greeting, in confident anticipation of happiness.

  Only of course he was not there this time. The door had opened, but nobody had come in. She got up to shut it, the flying fantasy leaving a black hiatus; in the midst of which she remembered that for once she was not alone, and, feeling the visitor’s eyes following her with a question, turned back to him, her own eyes painful from straining to see what had never been visible.

  ‘The wind must somehow have blown it open. Unless a ghost opened it.’ She closed the door firmly, with unnecessary force, and returned to the friend; one of the very few who still – out of pity? Curiosity? Force of habit? – spent an occasional evening with her.

  He nodded, smiling, with the amiable easy pretence of the unbeliever, tolerant enough to admit to ghosts of his own, before, rather obviously, changing the subject. Conversation continued, sounding unnaturally loud in her quiet room, which seemed to take on an air of pained surprise at the unaccustomed clatter of voices. But it was an effort for her to go on talking, and she soon fell silent, remaining absent, dispirited, more aware of the apparition that had failed to materialize than she was of the living guest, who left early, discouraged by her lack of interest in him, or in anything he could say, and was forgotten almost before he was out of the room.

  It was always the same now, the ghost always coming between her and her life in the world, so much more important, since that lost being was still her only companion, and their now-obsolete relationship the one true human contact she would ever have.

  The last time she had seen him in the flesh, all the vital force of his life stripped away, his sharpened face had confronted her with such a fearful fixed finality of sightless indifference that she had been frozen in mortal terror, engulfed by abysmal despair. After all the years of unfailing support, his huge, inhuman, deaf, blind inaccessibility was horrifying. He had not kept his promise. He had abandoned her, left her to suffer alone.

  Since he’d gone, the world had become unnervingly strange. There was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go. She felt lost, lonely, dazed, deprived of everything, even of her identity, which was not strong enough to survive without his constant encouragement and reassurance. Isolation clamped down on her. For days she saw no one, spoke to no one. The telephone seldom rang. The strangers in the streets seemed frightening, as if they belonged to a different species, pushing, hard-faced, hurrying past her without a glance. Waiting to cross, standing in the middle of the road, traffic tearing in both directions, she had a sense of utter estrangement from the noisy, inconsequential chaos around her, as if she stood in a no-world, peering doubtfully at shadows, wondering if any of them were real.

  Despite the frightful blow he’d inflicted on her by the act of ceasing to be, the man who had formerly filled her life was still her only reality. He had gone from the world. She would never see him again. And yet he was always with her, speaking to her, sharing her perceptions; he occupied her completely, leaving no room for life, excluding her from the world. Incapable of living without him, she had made him her ghostly reality. His ghost was better than nothing; it gave her no sense of the supernatural, in which she’d never believed, but at times seemed almost identical with the real man. Even more than while he had been alive, she was obsessed by him in a way that was not altogether pleasant, although, like an addiction, it was essential to her.

  He waylaid her everywhere: in avenues with prancing equestrian statues, in tree-lined squares, tube stations, libraries, shops. She knew he was waiting for her in other countries: beside lakes and mountains, in hotels and clinics, at a certain café where all one evening he’d written verses and made drawings for her, under the doomed goggling eyes of the crowded trout in their tank. He naturally frequented the streets and parks where they’d walked so often. Forgotten conversations sprang up and struck her among the tables of restaurants where they’d been together. In the quiet streets of her own district, any half-glimpsed face of a passer-by was likely to startle her with the possibility of being his. She would wake in the morning with the conviction that he was coming to see her, and sit all day watching the door, afraid of missing him if she moved. Or she would suddenly feel him waiting impatiently for her somewhere, and in nightmare anxiety race from one of their old meeting places to another, hours later finding herself at home, exhausted, desolated, almost in tears, not sure whether she’d really been to all those places or only imagined she had.

  A flimsy crumpled advertisement she took from the letterbox would, for a split second, become one of his scribbled notes, with an obscene cat drawn in the corner, the message scrawled in soft purple crayon illegible but for the words, ‘The poor M was here…’ She would rush to the telephone when it rang, expecting, for the first moment before the voice at the other end spoke in her ear, to hear his distraught voice utter her name. Almost daily, in her comings and goings about the town, a distant figure in a dark blue suit sliced her heart with an imagined resemblance. Hurrying out one day for a loaf of bread, suddenly she had a premonition. And, yes, there he was, walking in the same direction, among the people in front of her, bending forward slightly as if to thrust his way through them, hands and arms held a little away from him – there was no mistaking that characteristic prowling walk. But when she darted forward, eager and smiling, he became an elderly stranger with a heavy, morose face, and the ghostly illusion dissolved in the roar and diesel fumes of a passing bus. She did not wish to escape the consciousness of him, which nevertheless was a burden, like a dead body she carried about everywher
e and couldn’t bear to relinquish. Going into her workroom, she was half-surprised not to find him scrutinizing her latest paintings with a wry, enigmatic smile. Her disappointment darkened these paintings, already discoloured and splashed by the boredom and futility of her present existence. All her activities had become distasteful, dreary, a weariness to her. Everything she had ever done had been done for him. Why should she try to do anything now?

  She wandered out restlessly into the darkening garden, feeling the cool dusk rising round her like water, filling the small space, already full of his inescapable aura. He had been in the habit of dropping in for a few minutes at about this time, roaming round the garden or sitting there till it got dark. Sometimes, if she’d been specially preoccupied with her work, she had wished he would not interrupt her, and this memory caused her a fresh pang. She never did any work these days, so he could come whenever he pleased – why wasn’t he here now? As if the thought had invoked it, his hatless, hairless, dignified skull glimmered transparently for a second against the leaves at a spot where in other years he had planted beans. But directly afterwards there was only the deserted garden where nobody came any more, enclosed like a dark pool of twilight by trees and high walls, and containing nothing except her sadness and solitude and the silent watery chill of the rapidly deepening dusk. In the house, certain parts of the rooms, certain objects, always vividly evoked his image, and for these she could be prepared. It was the chance reminders, come upon unawares, that stabbed her most cruelly: a coat left on the settee, simulating his collapsed form sprawled on the green cushions, taking his pulse with two fingers, motionless with the fated calm of a man long familiar with the idea that any moment may be his last.

  The haunted vacancy of these darkening ghostly rooms drove her out into the streets to calm herself by the effort of walking. But still the relentless seconds assailed her like arrows one after the other with piercing loneliness, loss. The lights came on, outlining the shapes of strangers, whose faces, limbs, voices, gestures, tormented her with momentary fragments of similarity, which flew away at a second glance. She even caught sight once, in a dark entry, of his spectral monocled countenance smiling inscrutably as it did from so many snapshots, leaving her with a famished longing so acute that it seemed physical, and hardly to be endured. If only, just once more, he would come in the reassuring solidity she had valued so lightly while it was accessible to her. She knew exactly how they would meet, his eyes finding hers with absolute certainty, but at once moving on, while his mouth undermined this pretence by breaking into the glad, intimate smile of greeting that always made her forget the other look of pretended indifference – distance – what? What was that element of elusiveness which had been there from the start, confirming itself in the end by his broken promise, like some ancient curse nobody believed in, which had finally come true after all?

  The question remained unanswered. Deciding that she was tired enough to go home, she walked, dragging her feet wearily, through the emptying streets, not noticing anything, until arrested by the strong sense of his proximity, a few yards from the house where he’d lived all the time she had known him. Immediately she recalled the last painful occasion she’d been inside it, when his absence had been like a scream in the little rooms, where it was distressingly evident that no one now ever looked at the pictures, or took the books from the shelves. Certain small objects, special favourites he’d often stroked and held in his hands while he talked – a white jade fish, a painted Bengal tiger with a stiff string tail – had been incarcerated behind the glass doors of a cabinet, and glared out mournfully from their prison. She could not bear to see his beloved possessions uncared for, and, as soon as she was left alone for a minute, went out on to the stairs; where something impelled her to put her head round the door of his room, and she had instantly been struck down by most violent grief, as, in the act of reaching out to draw her towards the bed, his soft, strong hands disintegrated in thin air.

  It seemed to her now that the door of the garage – the only place where there was room for his piano – was open and that he was playing inside; an illusion so powerful that she moved involuntarily to join him; then, collecting herself with an effort, walked on in the direction of her own street. Familiar music he’d often played followed her as she went, floating after her in the dark; muted, melancholy, incomplete passages that seemed to come from the middle of some long piece which never ended, the beginning of which she had never heard. The wistful, wandering notes affected her with an intolerable sadness. Nevertheless, at the corner she stopped to listen again; but now the faint sounds had faded out and she was alone in the silent and empty darkness.

  Walking on, she wondered if it was safe to go to bed, if she would sleep now. Her legs ached with tiredness as she climbed the stairs and opened her door. The house looked dark and desolate inside. She went into the lobby, putting out one hand to switch off the outside light, and as she turned her head – never sure which switch controlled which bulb – to look down the staircase, a ghostly face glinted into her vision with an expression so heart-breakingly apologetic that she almost said aloud, ‘Don’t look like that. Nothing matters now that you’re here.’

  The First Year of My Life

  Muriel Spark

  Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a Scottish novelist best known for her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In 2008 The Times named her in its list of the ‘50 greatest British Writers since 1945’. Spark was twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was awarded the Golden PEN Award in 1998 by English PEN for her service to literature. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

  I was born on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday. Testimony abounds that during the first year of my life I never smiled. I was known as the baby whom nothing and no one could make smile. Everyone who knew me then has told me so. They tried very hard, singing and bouncing me up and down, jumping around, pulling faces. Many times I was told this later by my family and their friends; but, anyway, I knew it at the time.

  You will shortly be hearing of that new school of psychology, or maybe you have heard of it already, which after long and far-adventuring research and experiment has established that all of the young of the human species are born omniscient. Babies, in their waking hours, know everything that is going on everywhere in the world, they can tune in to any conversation they choose, switch on to any scene. We have all experienced this power. It is only after the first year that it was brainwashed out of us, for it is demanded of us by our immediate environment that we grow to be of use to it in a practical way. Gradually, our know-all brain-cells are blacked out although traces remain in some individuals in the form of ESP, and in the adults of some primitive tribes.

  It is not a new theory. Poets and philosophers, as usual, have been there first. But scientific proof is now ready and to hand. Perhaps the final touches are being put to the new manifesto in some cell at Harvard University. Any day now it will be given to the world, and the world will be convinced.

  Let me therefore get my word in first, because I feel pretty sure, now, about the authenticity of my remembrance of things past. My autobiography, as I very well perceived at the time, started in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far. Apart from being born bedridden and toothless, unable to raise myself on the pillow or utter anything but farmyard squawks or police-siren wails, my bladder and my bowels totally out of control, I was further depressed by the curious behaviour of the two-legged mammals around me. There were those black-dressed people, females of the species to which I appeared to belong, saying they had lost their sons. I slept a great deal. Let them go and find their sons. It was like the special pin for my nappies which my mother or some other hoverer dedicated to my care was always losing. These careless women in black lost their husbands and their brothers. Then they came to visit my mother and clucked and crowed over my cradle. I was not amused.

  ‘Babies never reall
y smile till they’re three months old,’ said my mother. ‘They’re not supposed to smile till they’re three months old.’

  My brother, aged six, marched up and down with a toy rifle over his shoulder.

  The grand old Duke of York

  He had ten thousand men;

  He marched them up to the top of the hill

  And he marched them down again.

  And when they were up, they were up

  And when they were down, they were down.

  And when they were neither down nor up

  They were neither up nor down.

  ‘Just listen to him!’

  ‘Look at him with his rifle!’

  I was about ten days old when Russia stopped fighting. I tuned in to the Czar, a prisoner, with the rest of his family, since evidently the country had put him off his throne and there had been a revolution not long before I was born. Everyone was talking about it. I tuned in to the Czar. ‘Nothing would ever induce me to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk,’ he said to his wife. Anyway, nobody had asked him to.

  At this point I was sleeping twenty hours a day to get my strength up. And from what I discerned in the other four hours of the day I knew I was going to need it. The Western Front on my frequency was sheer blood, mud, dismembered bodies, blistered crashes, hectic flashes of light in the night skies, explosions, total terror. Since it was plain I had been born into a bad moment in the history of the world, the future bothered me, unable as I was to raise my head from the pillow and as yet only twenty inches long. ‘I truly wish I were a fox or a bird,’ D. H. Lawrence was writing to somebody. Dreary old creeping Jesus. I fell asleep.

  Red sheets of flame shot across the sky. It was 21st March, the fiftieth day of my life, and the German Spring Offensive had started before my morning feed. Infinite slaughter. I scowled at the scene, and made an effort to kick out. But the attempt was feeble. Furious and impatient for some strength, I wailed for my feed. After which I stopped wailing but continued to scowl.