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

by Victoria Hislop

  The grand old Duke of York

  He had ten thousand men…

  They rocked the cradle. I never heard a sillier song. Over in Berlin and Vienna the people were starving, freezing, striking, rioting and yelling in the streets. In London everyone was bustling to work and muttering that it was time the whole damn business was over.

  The big people around me bared their teeth; that meant a smile, it meant they were pleased or amused. They spoke of ration cards for meat and sugar and butter.

  Where will it all end?

  I went to sleep. I woke and tuned in to Bernard Shaw who was telling someone to shut up. I switched over to Joseph Conrad who strangely enough, was saying precisely the same thing. I still didn’t think it worth a smile, although it was expected of me any day now. I got on to Turkey. Women draped in black huddled and chattered in their harems; yak-yak-yak. This was boring, so I came back to home base.

  In and out came and went the women in British black. My mother’s brother, dressed in his uniform, came coughing. He had been poison-gassed in the trenches. ‘Tout le monde à la bataille!’ declaimed Marshal Foch the old swine. He was now Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces. My uncle coughed from deep within his lungs, never to recover but destined to return to the Front. His brass buttons gleamed in the firelight. I weighed twelve pounds by now, I stretched and kicked for exercise seeing that I had a lifetime before me, coping with this crowd. I took six feeds a day and kept most of them down by the time the Vindictive was sunk in Ostend harbour, on which day I kicked with special vigour in my bath.

  In France the conscripted soldiers leapfrogged over the dead on the advance and littered the fields with limbs and hands, or drowned in the mud. The strongest men on all fronts were dead before I was born. Now the sentries used bodies for barricades and the fighting men were unhealthy from the start. I checked my toes and fingers, knowing I was going to need them. The Playboy of the Western World was playing at the Court Theatre in London, but occasionally I beamed over to the House of Commons which made me drop off gently to sleep. Generally, I preferred the Western Front where one got the true state of affairs. It was essential to know the worst, blood and explosions and all, for one had to be prepared, as the boy scouts said. Virginia Woolf yawned and reached for her diary. Really, I preferred the Western Front.

  In the fifth month of my life I could raise my head from my pillow and hold it up. I could grasp the objects that were held out to me. Some of these things rattled and squawked. I gnawed on them to get my teeth started. ‘She hasn’t smiled yet?’ said the dreary old aunties. My mother, on the defensive, said I was probably one of those late smilers. On my wavelength Pablo Picasso was getting married and early in that month of July the Silver Wedding of King George V and Queen Mary was celebrated in joyous pomp at St Paul’s Cathedral. They drove through the streets of London with their children. Twenty-five years of domestic happiness. A lot of fuss and ceremonial handing over of swords went on at the Guildhall where the King and Queen received a cheque for £53,000 to dispose of for charity as they thought fit. Tout le monde à la bataille! Income tax in England had reached six shillings in the pound. Everyone was talking about the Silver Wedding yak-yak-yak, and ten days later the Czar and his family, now in Siberia, were invited to descend to a little room in the basement. Crack, crack, went the guns; screams and blood all over the place, and that was the end of the Romanoffs. I flexed my muscles, ‘A fine healthy baby,’ said the doctor; which gave me much satisfaction.

  Tout le monde à la bataille! That included my gassed uncle. My health had improved to the point where I was able to crawl in my playpen. Bertrand Russell was still cheerily in prison for writing something seditious about pacifism. Tuning in as usual to the Front Lines it looked as if the Germans were winning all the battles yet losing the war. And so it was. The upper-income people were upset about the income tax at six shillings to the pound. But all women over thirty got the vote. ‘It seems a long time to wait,’ said one of my drab old aunts, aged twenty-two. The speeches in the House of Commons always sent me to sleep which was why I missed, at the actual time, a certain oration by Mr Asquith following the armistice on 11th November. Mr Asquith was a greatly esteemed former prime minister later to be an Earl, and had been ousted by Mr Lloyd George. I clearly heard Asquith, in private, refer to Lloyd George as ‘that damned Welsh goat’.

  The armistice was signed and I was awake for that. I pulled myself on to my feet with the aid of the bars of my cot. My teeth were coming through very nicely in my opinion, and well worth all the trouble I was put to in bringing them forth. I weighed twenty pounds. On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452. With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the table. One of my mother’s black-draped friends recited:

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  At some disputed barricade,

  When spring comes back with rustling shade

  And apple blossoms fill the air –

  I have a rendezvous with Death.

  Most of the poets, they said, had been killed. The poetry made them dab their eyes with clean white handkerchiefs.

  Next February on my first birthday, there was a birthday cake with one candle. Lots of children and their elders. The war had been over two months and twenty-one days. ‘Why doesn’t she smile?’ My brother was to blow out the candle. The elders were talking about the war and the political situation. Lloyd George and Asquith, Asquith and Lloyd George. I remembered recently having switched on to Mr Asquith at a private party where he had been drinking a lot. He was playing cards and when he came to cut the cards he tried to cut a large box of matches by mistake. On another occasion I had seen him putting his arm around a lady’s shoulder in a Daimler motor car, and generally behaving towards her in a very friendly fashion. Strangely enough she said, ‘If you don’t stop this nonsense immediately I’ll order the chauffeur to stop and I’ll get out.’ Mr Asquith replied, ‘And pray, what reason will you give?’ Well anyway it was my feeding time.

  The guests arrived for my birthday. It was so sad, said one of the black widows, so sad about Wilfred Owen who was killed so late in the war, and she quoted from a poem of his:

  What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

  The children were squealing and toddling around. One was sick and another wet the floor and stood with his legs apart gaping at the puddle. All was mopped up. I banged my spoon on the table of my high chair.

  But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

  At midnight in some flaming town;

  When spring trips north again this year,

  And I to my pledged word am true,

  I shall not fell that rendezvous.

  More parents and children arrived. One stout man who was warming his behind at the fire, said, ‘I always think those words of Asquith’s after the armistice were so apt… ’

  They brought the cake close to my high chair for me to see, with the candle shining and flickering above the pink icing. ‘A pity she never smiles.’

  ‘She’ll smile in time,’ my mother said, obviously upset.

  ‘What Asquith told the House of Commons just after the war,’ said that stout gentleman with his backside to the fire, ‘– so apt, what Asquith said. He said that the war has cleansed and purged the world, by God! recall his actual words: “All things have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege of our country to play her part… ”’

  That did it, I broke into a decided smile and everyone noticed it, convinced that it was provoked by the fact that my brother had blown out the candle on the cake. ‘She smiled!’ my mother exclaimed. And everyone was clucking away about how I was smiling. For good measure I crowed like a demented raven. ‘My baby’s smiling!’ said my mother.

  ‘It was the candle on her cake,’ they said.

  The
cake be damned. Since that time I have grown to smile quite naturally, like any other healthy and housetrained person, but when I really mean a smile, deeply felt from the core, then to all intents and purposes it comes in response to the words uttered in the House of Commons after the First World War by the distinguished, the immaculately dressed and the late Mr Asquith.

  Indignities

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Ellen Gilchrist (b. 1935) is an American author and poet who studied creative writing under Eudora Welty. Her 1981 collection of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, received immense critical acclaim and, in 1984, she won the National Book Award for her collection of stories, Victory Over Japan.

  Last night my mother took off her clothes in front of twenty-six invited guests in the King’s Room at Antoine’s. She took off her Calvin Klein evening jacket and her beige silk wrap-around blouse and her custom-made brassiere and walked around the table letting everyone look at the place where her breasts used to be.

  She had had them removed without saying a word to anyone. I’m surprised she told my father. I’m surprised she invited him to the party. He never would have noticed. He hasn’t touched her in years except to hand her a check or a paper to sign.

  After mother took off her blouse the party really warmed up. Everyone stayed until the restaurant closed. Teddy Lanier put the make on a waiter. Alice Lemle sang “A Foggy Day in London Town.” A poet called Cherokee stood up on an antique chair, tore open her dress, and drew the sign for infinity on her chest with a borrowed Flair pen. Amalie DuBois sat down by the baked Alaska and began eating the meringue with her fingers.

  Everyone followed us home. Someone opened the bar and Clarence Josephy sat down at the baby grand and began improvising. He always makes himself at home. There was a terrible period in my childhood when I thought he was going to be my father. I started going to mass with a little girl from Sacred Heart to pray he wouldn’t move in and have breakfast with us every day. I even bought a crucifix. I had worked up to forty-six Hail Marys a day by the time my father came home from Australia and the crisis passed.

  As soon as everyone was settled with a drink Mother went upstairs to change and I followed her. “Well, Mother,” I said, “this takes the cake. You could have given me some warning. I thought I was coming home for a birthday party.”

  “I’m leaving it all to you, Melissa,” she said. “Take my advice. Sell everything and fly to Paris.”

  I threw myself down on the bed with my hands over my ears, but she went tirelessly and relentlessly on. “This is your chance to rise above the categories,” she said. “God knows I’ve done my best to teach you the relativity of it all.” She sighed and shook her head, stepping into a long white dressing gown. I had always been a disappointment to her, that’s for certain. No illicit drugs, no unwanted pregnancies, no lesbian affairs, no irate phone calls from teachers, never a moment’s doubt that 1 was living up to my potential.

  Melissa was born old, my mother always tells everyone, born with her fingers crossed.

  “Why do you think you’re dying, Mother?” I said. “Just tell me that, will you? Lots of women get breast cancer. It doesn’t mean you’re going to die.”

  “It means I’m going to die,” she said. “And I’ll tell you one thing. I am never setting foot inside that hospital again. I’ve never run across such a humorless unimaginative group in my life. And the food! Really, it’s unforgivable.”

  “Mother,” I said, trying to put my arms around her.

  “Now, Melissa,” she said, “let’s save the melodrama for the bourgeoisie. I have a book for you to read.” She always has a book for me to read. She has a book about everything. She reads the first chapter and the table of contents and the last three paragraphs and if she likes the theory she says APPROVED and goes on to the next book.

  If she really likes the theory she writes the author and the publisher and buys twenty copies and gives them away to friends. She has ruined a lot of books for me that way. What real book could live up to one of mother’s glowing and inaccurate descriptions?

  It must be interesting to be her daughter, people say to me.

  I don’t know, I tell them. I’ve never tried it. I use her for a librarian.

  The book she pressed upon me now was Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., M.D. It was full of first-person accounts by men and women who were snatched from the jaws of death and came back to tell of their ecstatic experiences on the brink of nonbeing. The stories are remarkably similar. It seems the soul lifts off from the body like a sort of transparent angel and floats around the corpse. Then the person sees someone he is dying to talk to standing at the end of a tunnel swinging a lantern and waiting for him.

  “But who are you in such a hurry to see, Mother,” I said, “all of your friends are downstairs and you never liked your own parents.”

  “Perhaps Leonardo will be there. Perhaps Blake is waiting for me. Or Margaret Mead or Virginia Woolf.”

  “How old will you be in heaven, Mother?” I ask, being drawn into the fantasy.

  “Oh, thirty-four I think. Attractive, yet intelligent enough to be interesting. What color was my hair at that age? The only thing I regret about all this is that I never had time to grow out my gray hair. I kept putting it off. Vanity, vanity.”

  “Mother, let’s stop this.”

  “Right. Not another word.” She sprayed herself with Shalimar and giving me a pat on the cheek went downstairs to her guests, leaving me alone in her room.

  Her room is half of the second floor of a Queen Anne house designed by Thomas Sully in 1890.

  There is a round bed on a dais with dozens of small soft pillows piled against a marble headboard. There is a quilt made by her great-grandmother’s slaves and linen sheets the colors of the sky at evening.

  Everything else in the room is white, white velvet, white satin, white silk, white marble, white painted wood.

  There is a dressing table six feet long covered with every product ever manufactured by Charles of the Ritz.

  There is a huge desk littered with papers and books, her unpublished poems, her short stories, her journals, her unfinished novels.

  “Mother,” I called, following her into the hall, “what about the novels. Who will finish the novels?”

  “We’ll give them to somebody who needs them,” she called back. “Some poor person who doesn’t have any.”

  I went downstairs to find her reclining on a love seat with her admirers sitting at her feet drinking brandy and helping plan the funeral.

  I was surprised at how traditional her plans have become. Gone was the flag-shaped tombstone saying IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME. Gone the videotape machine in the mausoleum.

  “Some readings from García Márquez,” she was saying. “Lionel can do them in Spanish. Spanish always sounds so religious, don’t you agree?”

  “How long do you think it will be,” Bartlett said.

  “Not more than six months surely,” Mother said. “February.”

  “I like a winter funeral myself,” Eric said. “Especially in this climate.”

  The weather was perfect for the funeral. “Don’t you know she arranged this,” everyone kept saying. As we were entering the chapel a storm blew up quite suddenly. Rain beat on the walls and lightning flashed through the stained-glass windows.

  Then, just as we were carrying the coffin outside, the sun broke from the clouds. “That was going too far,” everyone agreed.

  Later, a wind blew up from the east and continued to blow while we shoveled dirt on the coffin. “Really!” everyone muttered.

  “Melissa,” she had said to me, “swear you will never let strangers lower my box.” So, while the gravediggers sat politely nearby wondering if we belonged to some new kind of cult, we cranked the coffin down and picked up the shovels.

  Clarence turned on the tape player and we shoveled to Mahler for a while, then to Clementi, then Bach.

  “I remember the night she chartered a pl
ane and flew to California for the earthquake,” Lionel said, pulling a feather out of his hat and dropping it in the hole. He was wearing a velvet suit and an enormous green hat with feathers. He looked like a prehistoric bird.

  “Remember the year she learned to scuba dive,” Selma said, weeping all over her white tuxedo and dropping an onyx ring on top of the feather. “She didn’t even know how to swim.”

  “I remember the week she played with me,” I said. “I was four years old. She called and had a piano crate delivered and we turned it into a house and painted murals all over the walls. The title of our mural was Welsh Fertility Rites with Sheepdogs Rampant.”

  The wind kept on blowing and I kept on shoveling, staring down at all that was left of my childhood, now busily growing out yards and yards of two-toned hair.

  The Pill-Box

  Penelope Lively

  Penelope Lively (b. 1933) is a critically acclaimed British author of fiction for both children and adults. She won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1973, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and also the Man Booker Prize for her 1987 novel, Moon Tiger. Lively was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours list.

  The writer of a story has an infinity of choices. An infinity of narratives; an infinity of endings. The process of choosing, of picking this set of events rather than that, of ending up here rather than there – well, call it what you like: craft, art, accident, intuition.

  Call it what you like, it’s a curious process.

  I teach Eng. Lit. Consequently I try to point this sort of thing out to the young. Life and literature – all that. Parallels; illuminations. I’m no mystic, but there’s one thing that never ceases to astonish me: the fixity of things. That we live with it, accept it as we do. That we do not question that the course of events is thus, and never could be other. When you think of how nearly, at every moment, it is not.