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

by Victoria Hislop

  Cathy began to slip. She made mistakes. She sold the wrong bags to the wrong women and her patter died. She waited for another woman to pick up the tobacco-brown bag to see what might happen. She sold indiscriminately. She looked at every woman who came her way and she just didn’t know anymore.

  She could, of course, change her job. She might, for example, work as a hospital maid, in the cardiac ward, which was full of certainties.

  Women did not get heart attacks. They would come at visiting time and talk too much or not at all. She could work out who loved simply or in silence. She could spot those who might as well hate. She would look at their bags without judgement, as they placed them on the coverlets, or opened them for tissues. They might even let a tear drip inside.

  Cathy emptied out her building-society account and walked up to the hat department with a plastic bag filled with cash. She said, ‘Ramona, I want to buy every hat you have.’ She did the same at Shoes, although she stipulated size five-and-a-half. She didn’t make a fuss when refused. She stuffed the till of her own counter full of notes, called a taxi and hung herself with bags, around her neck and down her arms. All kinds of people looked at her. Then she went to bed for a week, feeling slightly ashamed.

  She kept the one fatal bag, the brown calf-skin with a snap clasp. She abused it. She even used it to carry things. She started to sleep around.

  Waiting Room (The First)

  Elizabeth Jolley

  Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007) was a British-born writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. She was fifty-three when her first book was published, and went on to write fifteen novels, four short story collections and three works of non-fiction.

  These days I live with the need to have something lined up to do next. The way in which I live reminds me of a joke; there are two goldfish swimming round and round in a goldfish bowl and one fish is telling the other fish that there’s no time to chat as it’s one of those ‘get things done’ days.

  I make little lists because I might forget what I am doing, or more importantly, what I am going to do. Like going to the doctor’s to see if my moles are cancer, like throwing away left-over food, old clothes, letters and other papers, especially receipts and bank statements saved over a great many years in case of a possible taxation audit (random).

  It’s when I am sitting in waiting rooms that I take stock of the way things are, of the way I’m living and of the way I used to live. I compare my life with other people’s lives in a rather superficial way. Not comparisons about money but rather on the quality of roof beams, joists, floor boards and the sizes and shapes of windows.

  I go back in my thoughts quite often. One time I actually try to remember all the names of the hospitals in the city where I lived for years in the English Midlands. There was, at that time, the Hospital for the Diseases of Women, the Sick Children’s, the Ear, Nose and Throat, the Skin Hospital, the Fever, the Cancer, the General, the Accident (Queens) and the Queen Elizabeth. The QE was Maternity as well. I manage to stop the litany before going on to the names of streets, churches, schools and shops, though the names of houses come to mind – Sans Souci, Barclay, The Hollies, Padua, St Cloud and Prenton. Naturally, the hedges follow, the closely watched hedges, the laurel and the privet, the rhododendrons and the holly, evergreens in a series of repetitive quartets.

  Those hedges from another country have given way to the honeysuckle, the hibiscus, the oleander, the plumbago, the white and pink climbing roses, the wistaria and the geraniums. There are too the street lawns, the box trees, the plane trees, the peppermints and the cape lilacs. But perhaps it is the blue metal, the smooth and the rough, which I notice the most when we are walking. The habit of closely watching the hedges is not lost, if anything it is more intense, and intensely, too, the roads. The roads are closely watched; Harold Hammond Goldsworthy Bernard the park Thompson Koeppe Princess Caxton Warwick and Queen and back Queen Warwick Caxton…

  I need a shrink, I say to myself, and go on to say that shrink is not a word I use. The use of it, even if not said aloud, is an indication that I need someone with specialist training.

  Really this place! All I seem able to do here is to stare at the other people. We all seem stupid sitting here with a conventional obedience which is expected of us.

  The chairs here are all joined together, fixed, making a square space in the middle where children can play. There are some little chairs and a low table for the children. I forget about myself for a bit, when I see a small child staggering about with a big plastic bucket. He has thick dark curls and a pale face and I pity him throwing up so much that he has to take a bucket around.

  What’s the matter with me, I think then, because ‘throwing up’ is a phrase I never use; neither do I say ‘around’ instead of round. I dismiss all this immediately when I see that the child is loading up the bucket with all the toys, the building blocks and farm animals, provided for all the children to play with, and is hauling them off to the safe harbour between his squatting mother’s possessive spread-out legs.

  A man sitting diagonally opposite gives his urine specimen to his wife to hold and she takes it and goes on reading her magazine holding the thing as if she was a specimen-glass holder, as if it is meant that she should just sit there, holding this specimen glass while he sits back stroking his chin and raising his eyebrows in every direction in turn round the waiting room; see here everybody, meet the wife, my specimen-glass holder.

  The receptionist behind the curved desk has a commanding view of the whole room. When I look at her it is clear to me that she would prefer a dress shop in a not too classy department store. A place in which she could peek round the fitting-room curtains saying with emphasis, ‘it’s you dear’ either for a dress, a blouse or a hat. It is probable that the pay is better in the Outpatients’ Clinic and the hours less barbaric, especially since the decision not to have the clinic open at all on Fridays. I notice every time, without really meaning to, that she wears mostly red dresses or blouses with low V-neck lines exposing the healthy unworried skin of a woman approaching middle age and a suggestion of a similarly healthy and unworried bosom, more or less out of sight.

  Certain days are set aside for walking sticks, crutches and wheelchairs. On these days I remind myself often to count my blessings and to remember that there are people worse off etc. For one thing I am only accompanying a patient and am not a patient myself. Without meaning to, against my will, I notice that some of the patients have a perpetually grieved look and some seem actually to be parading their disability. They exaggerate a grieved way of walking with one shoulder higher than the other, the body turned inwards on itself and the head tilted to one side. They seem to have the special skill of taking up the whole width of any place and then there’s no way of getting round them like when you’re waiting to go down in the small elevator to the Lab for blood tests. Sometimes people, like these people and unfortunates, will take up all the room in the aisles in the supermarket. Walking on two sticks, lurching first to one side and then the other, they make it impossible for anyone else to pass or even reach round for a tin of dog food, a cereal or some soap powder.

  I suppose all this sounds cruel and without sympathy. It is not meant to. I might be on two sticks myself one day. Such thoughts, like everything else at present, are very out of character. Like this morning when there are no oranges to squeeze I am shaken to discover how much the disappearance of a small ritual can disturb me and cause an inability to go on to the next thing – just because one insignificant part of the morning routine is missing.

  When I ask Mr George what he had for lunch he does not remember and when I ask was it nice, what he had for lunch, he says that it was very nice and, because it was nice, it is a pity that he does not remember what it was.

  It is a pity, he says, to forget something nice.

  An occupational therapist, with knitting needles pushed into her hair which is dressed in a firm grey bun, approaches. She has cut, she tells me, s
ome pieces, squares and circles, of foam cushion material. She gives them to me saying that she knows relatives and friends enjoy being involved. She says that making little chintzy covers for these is a nice way of spending the long afternoons. She calls her pieces soft splints for pressure areas. She smiles with real pleasure.

  I want to tell her that I don’t have long afternoons except in my consulting rooms and I am not able to sew there. I nearly explain that I can’t sew, it’s a bit like not being able to dance, I mean ballroom dancing, it is always an embarrassment to say, ‘I can’t dance.’ It is the same with sewing.

  I can imagine all too easily the sense of futility which would all too quickly obliterate the hopefulness accompanying the giving of these chintz covers to some of my afternoon appointments who do, indeed, need occupation and direction but who have, at the same time, the ability in the face of offered activity to make the activity seem useless and unnecessary. This attribute is of course a symptom of the cause which might not be cured by the covering of soft splints with fragments of a cheerful material.

  Telegony I: Going into a Dark House

  Jane Gardam

  Jane Gardam (b. 1928) is a British author, who writes for both children and adults. Her first novel for adults, God on the Rocks, was published in 1978 and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. She has won the Whitbread Award twice, for The Queen of the Tambourines and The Hollow Land, and was awarded an OBE in 2009 in recognition of her distinguished literary career.

  Molly Fielding’s mother had been a terrible woman born about the same time as Tennyson’s Maud and as unapproachable.

  Nobody knew anything much about her, Molly herself being now very ancient. Molly had been my grandmother’s friend and my mother’s, before she was mine, but with the demise of each generation she seemed to grow younger and freer – to take strength. Her hair, her clothes, her house, all were up to the minute. So were her investments; and her foreign holidays became farther and farther flung.

  I had found the photograph of her mother before my own mother died. It was a coffee-coloured thing mounted on thick, fluffy, cream paper, unframed in a drawer, with the photographer’s name in beautiful copperplate across the corner: ‘Settimo’.

  I could not believe it. Signor Settimo! He had taken my own photograph when I was a child. I remembered a delicious little man like a chocolate, with black hair and eyes and Hitler’s square moustache. My Settimo must have been the son – or even grandson – of course. Molly Fielding’s mother must have known the first. Probably the first Settimo had come over from Italy with the icecream makers and organ grinders of the fin de siècle. It was a long-established firm when I knew it and a photographer in the English Midlands with a glamorous, lucky name such as Settimo would be almost home and dry. All he’d need would be flair and a camera and a book of instructions – a match for anyone.

  But not for Molly Fielding’s mother. Oh, dear me no. There she sits, her strong jaw raised, its tip pointing straight at the lens. Very watchful. She is examining the long hump of Mr Settimo beneath the black cloth behind the tripod. Her eyes – small eyes – are saying, ‘Try – but you’ll not take me. I take.’

  Her great face, like his small one, is covered in black cloth. Hers is covered by a fine veil of silk netting, tied tight round the back of her neck by a broad black velvet ribbon. It is stitched at the top round the hat brim – a tight hat, expensive and showy, glittering with jet beads like the head of a snake. Her own head is proudly up, her eyes are very cunning. Oho, how she despises Mr Settimo, the tradesman. She is smiling a most self-satisfied smile. She is armed with a cuirass of necklaces across her beaded front, a palisade of brooches, great gauntlets of rings. She is fair-skinned beneath the veil. She must have been a pretty young girl, and her mouth, above the chin grown fierce, is still small and curly and sexy. No lady. Like somebody’s cook but in the way that duchesses can look like somebody’s cook. Not born rich, you can see – but now she is rich. At this moment, seated before foreign little Mr Settimo, she is rich. I never saw a nastier piece of work than Molly Fielding’s mother. I swear it. I don’t know how I knew – but I swear it.

  ‘What an awful woman. Who is it?’

  My mother said, ‘Oh, dear, that’s old Molly Fielding’s mother. I knew her. She was a character.’

  ‘You knew her! She looks before the Punic Wars.’

  ‘She was, just about. God knows. An authentic mid-Victorian. She had Molly very late. She was famous for some sort of reputation but I can’t remember what it was. She died about the time Molly married, and that would be all of sixty years ago.’

  ‘What was the husband like?’

  ‘Oh, long gone. Nobody knew him. Molly can’t remember him. Maybe there wasn’t a husband, but I think I’d have remembered if it was that. I think he was just dispensed with somehow. He was very weak – or silly. But rich.’

  ‘She doesn’t look as if she would have needed anyone, ever.’

  ‘Well, she certainly didn’t need poor old Molly. Her only child, you know, and she hated her. Molly – such a silent little thing at school. After that she was “at home with mother”.’

  ‘Didn’t she ever work?’

  ‘Are you mad, child? She had to gather up her mother’s shawls and go visiting with her and return the library books.’

  ‘Until she married?’

  ‘Yes. And she’d never have married if her mother could have stopped it. She was always very attractive, Molly. Not beautiful but attractive. She was never let out of her mother’s sight – and not let into anyone else’s. They lived in hotels, I think, up and down the country. Sometimes in boarding-house places abroad. There had been a big house somewhere but they left it!’

  ‘Were they poor?’

  ‘Rich, dear, rich, just look some time at Molly’s rings.’

  This conversation was years ago and since then I have often looked at Molly’s rings. I looked at them the other day when she came to lunch with me and they still shone wickedly, catching the light of the winter dining room, weighting down her little claws. Molly was a trim, spare, little woman and the claws were smaller now and even sharper-looking than when I’d seen her last, two years ago. Her nails were tiny and beautifully manicured and the prickly old clusters below them looked loose enough at any moment to go sliding off into the chicken supreme.

  ‘Looking at the rings?’ she asked. ‘You’re not getting them, dear. They’re for impeccable Alice. My albatrosses. She could have them now if she wanted. I hardly wear them. High days and holidays, like this. I keep them in – no, I’m not going to tell you. You never know. Careless talk… You think they’re vulgar, do you?’

  ‘No. I was just – well, remembering them. From way back. They looked smaller then. Your rings were you. Most things look bigger when you’re young.’

  ‘I’m smaller,’ she said, ‘that’s all it is. I keep getting them re-made but they can’t keep pace with me. I get them done over every year before the insurance runs out. I tell the insurance people the stones rattle. They don’t, but you can get them cleaned free if you say that. A jeweller cleans them better than you can yourself. A good jeweller always cleans when he secures. Gin – that’s all you can do for yourself, soak them in gin. But it’s a waste. You feel you can’t drink it afterwards with all the gunge in it.’

  The rings shone clear and sharp and there was not a trace of gunge and never had been, for Molly had a code of practice for the maintenance of goods that would have impressed a shipping company; and she had an eye for the free acquisition of necessities and schemes for the painless saving of money that many a government might envy. She also had a talent for the command of luxury. Stories of Molly sharing hotel rooms for which her friends and acquaintances had paid were in my childhood canon. She had slept on the floor of the Hyde Park, for instance, with her daughter’s old nanny who had struck it rich with a (now absent) South American lover.

  ‘Nanny had the bed of course – I insisted. Yes, she did fuss about me be
ing on the floor, and we did change over about eleven o’clock, but I’d have been perfectly happy. Who minds sleeping on a floor if it saves two hundred pounds a night? They never notice, you know. I’d been Nanny’s dinner guest and we went up to her room after dinner as if to get my coat. No one notices if you don’t go home. And it was Harvey Nichols’ sale in the morning, just across the road. I felt since I’d saved two hundred pounds I could spend it.’

  ‘But, Molly, you didn’t have to spend two hundred pounds. You didn’t have to go into London the night before at all. You only live in Rickmansworth.’

  ‘Oh, but there’s nothing in Rickmansworth like the Hyde Park Hotel. Another thing, dear, did you know you can get a jolly good free bath on Paddington Station? There’s a very decent bathroom in the Great Western. You just go in there for a coffee and then trot upstairs to the ladies’ room and along the corridor and you’re in a very nice big bathroom with marble fittings and nice old brass chains to the plugs. Thundering hot water, dear. I take soap and a towel always when I’m in London. In a Harrods bag.’

  ‘You could be arrested.’

  ‘Rubbish. There’s not a hint of a sign saying “Private”. It says Bathroom. Nobody uses it but me because all the rooms are this ghastly thing En Suite now. Have you noticed on the motorway – the motels? “24 En Suites”. I’d never stay in a place like the Great Western now, of course. It’s only for commercial travellers. But the bathroom’s useful if you have to change for the evening. It saves that nonsense of belonging to a so-called Club. Deadly places – all full of old women. Victoria Station was very good, too, before the War, and at St Pancras, The Great Northern, you could always stay a night no questions asked if you knew the ropes and wore the right clothes. They used to leave the keys standing in the doors. So unwise.