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

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘And did you know you can spend such a pleasant hour or so in the London Library simply by ignoring the Members Only notice? You just walk in looking thoughtful and go upstairs to the Reading Room. It’s a pity they’ve moved the old leather armchairs. They were so comfortable and you could sleep in them before a matinée. I always picked up one of the learned journals from the racks – something like The John Evelyn Society Quarterly – so that they’d think I was an old don.’

  ‘They can see you’re no don, Molly, with those diamonds.’

  ‘I turn them round, dear. I’m not silly. They used to give you a tray of tea in the London Library once, you know, but all those nice things have stopped since the Conservatives got in. Look – an elastic band. It’s the Post Office. I keep these. The postmen drop them all over England – all up the drive of the Final Resting Place. I told the postman they’re worth money so now he drops them all through my letter box instead, great showers of them, like tagliatelle.’

  We were walking on the common now. Lunch was over. It was a cold day and people were muffled up and pinched of face but Molly looked brisk and scarcely seventy. From the back – her behind neat, her legs and ankles skinny – she might have been forty-five. She wore a beautiful, old, lavender-mixture tweed suit and no glasses and she carried no stick. Trotting around her was a new puppy, a border collie she was training. She walked at a good speed through the spruces, as fast as I did and nearly as fast as the puppy, which she’d let off the lead. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes were bright and several people smiled at her as she went by. One old boy of about sixty gave her the eye and said he agreed about the wastage of elastic bands.

  I said we should turn back as it was going to rain and she didn’t want to be landed with a cold.

  ‘I never catch cold,’ she said. ‘It’s because I don’t use public transport. I like my car. It was quite unnecessary for you to fetch and carry me today, you know. Very nice of you – but I’d have enjoyed crossing London again.’

  ‘Do they let you drive still, Molly?’ She had one of the little houses on an estate for the elderly she called the Final Resting Place.

  ‘They can’t stop me. Not yet. It’s coming up of course – next driving test. Well, yes, they do fuss a bit. I can’t remember where I’m going sometimes after I’ve set off, and the other day I couldn’t remember where I’d been.’

  ‘That might be a warning sign, you know, Molly. That it’s time to stop.’

  ‘Oh, fish! Wait till I get properly lost, then I’ll stop. I’ve a card in my bag with my telephone number. I haven’t forgotten who I am yet.’

  ‘That does happen—’

  ‘Oh, that Alzheimer business. That must be a terrible thing. But it only happens to the old, doesn’t it?’ She roared with laughter and clipped the dog on the lead.

  Molly’s dogs have always been wonderfully well behaved and obedient – never smelled or chewed things or wet things or snapped or barked. Rather dispirited animals really. She never appeared to pay much attention to them. Years ago I remembered that she had said it was her mother who had taught her how to handle dogs.

  ‘Come on,’ she cried from the traffic island in the middle of the High Street. ‘You’ll get run over if you hang about. Make a dash.’

  At tea – she’d done well at lunch with a couple of sherries and a glass of chablis with the chicken – she settled down to a crumpet and a long and interesting analysis of her investments. As usual I forgot altogether that Molly had been my grandmother’s friend. I forgot the great string of years she had known, the winters and winters and winters, the spring after spring, flowing back and back and back to the first mornings of the century. I forgot the huge number of times she had woken to another day.

  When I was a girl, Molly would come breezing by to see us in a fast car, usually with a woman friend, never with a man or her husband who had been, like her father, a shadow. (She had married in ten minutes, my grandmother used to say, when her mother was upstairs in bed having measles of all things: absolutely furious, her mother was, too. In fact she died.) When I was a girl, I had always felt that Molly was empowered with an eternal youth, more formidable, much more effective, than my transient youth that seemed longer ago.

  ‘Well, I’m not clever,’ she often said. ‘I’m a fool, dear. I know my limitations. No education and not a brain in my head. That’s the secret. You’re all so clever now – and all so good. It does age people. And also of course I’m frightfully mean. I don’t eat or drink much unless I’m out.’

  But she wasn’t mean. When she gave a present, having said she could afford nothing, it tended to be stupendous. Once she gave me a car. And she did leave me one of the rings. But, ‘I’m mean,’ she said. ‘And I’m not intellectual. I always wanted to be a racing driver after motor cars came in. Not allowed to, of course. D’you think I’m embittered?’ (She shrieked with laughter.) ‘I’ve struggled through. I’ve struggled through.’

  And struggle it had sometimes looked to be – her freezing house, her empty hearth and fridge, her beautiful but ancient clothes all mended and pressed and hung in linen bags in the wardrobe. She had often sat wrapped in rugs to save coal. She had never had central heating. An ascetic pauper – until you looked at her investments, and they were wonderful. Whenever you saw her reading the financial columns she was smiling.

  ‘And,’ she said, ‘hand it to me. I’m rational. That’s what gets you through in the end, you know – being rational. I’ve no imagination, thank God. I give to charity but I’ve the sense not to watch the news. “Thank God” by the way is jargon. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe that half the people I know who go to church and carry on at Christmas and go to the Messiah and that sort of thing – that they do either. All my Bridge lot, of course they don’t believe in God. Religion’s always seemed to me to be fairy stories. I go to church now and then, but it’s for keeping up friendships and the look of it. And I quite enjoy weddings and funerals, of course.’

  She was awesome, Molly. Awful really. But she was so nice.

  She was in the midst of one of these ‘I’m rational’ conversations, the refrain that had threaded all my association with her, and she was eating her crumpet, and I was wondering why she was still insisting on her – well, on her boringness, and why she didn’t bore me, why she never annoyed me; and I had decided it was because she never dissembled, that in my life her total truthfulness was unique. The truth Molly told showed her to be good. A good, straight being. Molly the unimaginative was unable to lie.

  At which point she suddenly said, ‘By the way, my mother’s been seen around again.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Around the village. And the FRP. She’s looking for me, you know. But she won’t find me.’

  I said, ‘Your mother?’

  She said, ‘Yes. You didn’t know her. You were lucky. I hated her. Of course you know I did. You must have heard. She was very cruel to me. Well, she’s back. Darling, are you going to take me home to the house of the near-dead? It’s getting dark.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Are you ready?’

  ‘I’ll just run upstairs.’

  This she did and I waited with her coat and gloves and walking shoes and the basket with the dog’s belongings and the dog.

  ‘Yes,’ she said coming down the stairs, twisting about at her knickers. ‘Yes, she’s been around for quite a time, a year or so. I don’t know where she was before. I’ve managed to keep out of her way up to now. I hope that she didn’t spot me leaving today, she’d have wanted to come, too.’

  So, half an hour later I said, ‘Molly, do you mean your mother?’

  ‘Yes, dear. I’m afraid she was very unkind. I don’t often talk about it. I was very frightened of her. D’you know, dear, I don’t know when I’ve had such a wonderful day. Oh, how I’ve enjoyed it. Now if you turn left here and left again we can take the short cut and get straight to the bypass. You see I know exactly where I am. Now don’t come in with me – you m
ust get back before the traffic.’

  I said, ‘Molly—’

  She kissed me, hesitated, and then got out. I saw her standing motionless before her mock-Georgian front door looking first at the lock, then at her key.

  ‘Shall I open it?’ I called to her.

  ‘No, no. Of course not. Don’t treat me as senile. Ninety-four is nothing. It won’t be thought anything of soon. When you’re ninety-four there’ll be hundreds of you, with all this marvellous new medicine that’s going on.’

  ‘Goodbye, dear Molly. I’ll wait till you’re safe inside.’

  ‘It’s just that the lights aren’t on.’ She said, ‘If you could just watch me in from the car. Just watch till I light everything up. It’s so silly but I don’t greatly like going into a dark house.’

  I drove to the estate office and spoke to the lady superintendent who said that Molly was indeed still driving, though they were getting worried about it. She said that Molly was utterly sensible, utterly rational and her eyes and mind were very good. In fact she upset the younger ones by doing her stocks and shares and phoning her broker in the public common room.

  ‘No aberrations? Does her mind wander?’

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘She is our star turn.’

  Yet on the way home I decided to ring up her daughter, Alice, and was walking towards the phone the next morning when it began to ring, and it was Alice calling me. There were the statutory empty screams about how long since we’d spoken and then she asked if it were true that Molly had been to lunch with me. I said yes, and that I’d fetched her and taken her back, of course.

  ‘Not “of course” at all, ducky. Do you know she’s still driving?’

  I went on like the superintendent for a bit: about the beady eye that saw me look at the rings, the high-speed walk, the psychic hold over the dog, the fearlessness on the High Street, the splendid appetite. ‘There was just—’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Well, she says her mother is about. Alice, her mother’d be about a hundred and thirty years old.’

  ‘I know. Oh, heaven, don’t I know. Did she say her mother’s looking for her around the village?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And making her clean her nails and polish her shoes and – She rings me up and asks me to bring a cake over because her mother’s coming to tea. About twice a week.’

  ‘But I’ve never heard her mention her mother before.’

  ‘The doctors say it’s the supply of oxygen to the brain. It’s running uneven, like a car with dirty plugs. There are vacuums or something, and it’s in the vacuums she really lives. Maybe it’s where we all really live.’

  ‘But all the bossy, sensible, happy years?’

  ‘All the years. It was all there underneath, always. The fear.’

  Fat People

  Alison Lurie

  Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her novel Foreign Affairs. She has published ten novels, one collection of short stories, and a non-fiction work entitled The Language of Clothes.

  I never ran into any spooks in sheets; no headless horsemen, haunted mansions, nothing like that. But there was something weird once –

  It was a while ago, when Scott went to India on that research grant. The first thing that happened was, I began noticing fat people. I saw them snatching the shrimps and stuffed eggs at parties; I saw them strolling along Cayuga Street with the swaying sailor’s gait of the obese, and pawing through the queen-size housecoats in J. C. Penney. They were buying tubs of popcorn at the flicks, ahead of me in line at the post office and the bank, and pumping self-serve gas into their pickup trucks when I went to the garage.

  I didn’t pay much attention at first; I figured that since I was dieting I was more aware of people who should be doing the same. My idea was to lose fifteen pounds while Scott was away – twenty if possible, because of what he’d said just before he left.

  We were at the county airport on a cold weepy day in March, waiting for Scott’s plane and trying to keep up a conversation, repeating things we’d already said. I’d seen Scott off on trips before; but this time he’d be gone over three months. He was saying he wished I were coming, and promising to wire from Delhi and write twice a week, and telling me he loved me and reminding me again to check the oil on the Honda. I said I would, and was there anything else I should do while he was away?

  Then the flight was announced and we grabbed each other. But we were both wearing heavy down jackets, and it didn’t feel real. It was like two bundles of clothes embracing, I said, all choked up. And Scott said, ‘Well, there is one thing we could both do while I’m gone, Ellie; we could lose a few pounds.’ He was kissing my face and I was trying not to break down and howl.

  Then Scott was through the X-ray scanner into the boarding lounge, and then he was crossing the wet tarmac with his carry-on bag, getting smaller and smaller, and climbing the steps. It wasn’t till I’d gone back to the main waiting-room and was standing inside the teary steamed-up window watching his plane shrink and blur into fog that I really registered his last remark.

  I drove back to Pine Grove Apartments and dragged off my fat coat and looked at myself in the mirror on the back of the closet door. I knew I was a big girl, at the top of the range for my height, but it had never bothered me before. And as far as I knew it hadn’t bothered Scott, who was hefty himself. Maybe when he suggested we lose a few pounds he was just kidding. But it was the last thing I’d hear him say for three months. Or possibly forever, I thought, because India was so far away and full of riots and diseases; and maybe in one of the villages he was going to they wouldn’t want to change their thousand-year-old agricultural methods, and they would murder Scott with long wavy decorated knives or serve him curry with thousand-year-old undetectable poisons in it.

  I knew it was bad luck to think that way, Scott had said so himself. I looked back at the mirror again, turning sideways. Usually I was pleased by what I saw there, but now I noticed that when I didn’t breathe in, my tummy stuck out as far as my breasts.

  Maybe I had put on some extra pounds that winter, I thought. Well, it should be pretty easy to take them off. It could be a project, something to do while Scott was gone. I wouldn’t write him about it, I’d save it for a surprise when he got back. ‘Wow, Ellie,’ he would say, ‘you look great.’

  Only it turned out not to be as easy as all that. After two weeks, I weighed exactly the same. One problem was that all our friends kept asking me over and serving meals it would have been a shame to refuse, not to mention rude. And when I didn’t have anywhere to go in the evening I started wandering around the apartment and usually ended up wandering into the kitchen and opening the fridge, just for something to do.

  It was about then that I began to notice how many fat people there were in town. All sorts and all ages: overweight country-club types easing themselves out of overweight cars; street people shoving rusted grocery carts jammed with bottles and bundles. Fat old men like off-duty Santa Clauses waddling through the shopping mall, fat teenagers with acne, and babies so plump they could hardly get their thumbs into their mouths.

  Of course I’d seen types like this before occasionally, but now they seemed to be everywhere. At first I put it down to coincidence, plus having the subject on my mind. It didn’t bother me; in a way it was reassuring. When some bulgy high-school senior came for an interview at the college, and tried to fit their rear end onto the chair by my desk, I would think as I smiled nicely and asked the standard questions, Well, at least I don’t look like that.

  My folks knew I was trying to lose weight, and wanted to help, but they only made it worse. Every time I went over to the house for Sunday dinner Dad would ask first thing if I’d heard from Scott. It got to be over three weeks, and I still had to say ‘No, nothing since the telegram,’ and remind them that we’d been warned about how bad the mails were.

  Then we’d sit down to the table and Mom would pass my plate, and
there’d be this measly thin slice of chicken on it, and a bushel of cooked greens, as if I was in some kind of concentration camp for fatties. The salads all started to have sour low-cal dressing, and there was never anything but fruit for dessert: watery melon, or oranges cut up with a few shreds of dry coconut on top, like little undernourished white worms.

  All through the meal Mom and Dad wouldn’t mention Scott again, so as not to upset me. There was nothing in the dining-room to remind anybody of Scott either, and of course there wasn’t any place set for him at the table. It was as if he’d disappeared or maybe had never even existed. By the time dinner was over I’d be so low in my mind I’d have to stop on the way home for a pint of chocolate marshmallow.

  I’d hang up my coat and turn on the television and measure out exactly half a cup of ice cream, 105 calories, less than a bagel. I’d put the rest in the freezer and feel virtuous. But when the next commercial came on I’d open the freezer and have a few more spoonfuls. And then the whole process would repeat, like a commercial, until the carton was scraped clean down to the wax.

  It got to be four weeks since Scott had left, and I still didn’t weigh any less, even when I shifted my feet on the scale to make the needle wobble downwards. I’d never tried to lose weight before; I’d always thought it was ridiculous the way some people went into agonies over diets. I’d even been kind of shocked when one of my married friends made more fuss about taking a second slice of peach pie than she did about taking a lover. Displaced guilt, I used to think.

  Now I was as hysterical about food as any of them. I brooded all afternoon over a fudge brownie I hadn’t had for lunch; and if I broke down and ordered one I made up excuses for hours afterwards. ‘I didn’t promise Scott I’d lose weight,’ I would tell myself, or ‘It’s not fair asking someone to give up both food and love at the same time.’