The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  On the last Saturday I escort all the students to Bury St Edmunds. A coach has been hired and I sit up beside the driver holding a microphone. As we approach the town along the Newmarket Road I indicate, to the left, the barracks where Rosenberg trained, on the right, my house. The coach halts in the large square at the top of Angel Hill. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘I’ll tell you what there is to see in Bury St Edmunds. Opposite are the walls of the Abbey, behind are the ruins and a park. There is a cathedral. Go up Abbeygate Street and you’ll come to the market. Fruit. Vegetables. Junk. Beyond the market is Moyses Hall. Built by a Jew in 1180. Unfortunately for him all the Jews were expelled from Bury in 1190. Now off you go. Back here at three o’clock.’ Gradually the others slip away until I am left with only Inge for company. It is a hot day, dusty with heat. The locals look white and sweaty, like creatures unused to the light. The women wear drab moth-proofed frocks that show off the freckles on their breasts; the men roll up their shirt-sleeves to reveal the tattoos upon their arms. It is a mystery, this abundance of sample-book tattooing, all of course applied by choice. By contrast Inge’s spectacular sexuality stops people in their tracks; her black scarf, her red tee-shirt, clinging like a second skin, her denim shorts and – this I know – no underwear. ‘I feel so good today,’ says Inge, ‘I should like a souvenir. Is there perhaps a booth where we can have our photograph taken together?’ ‘There’s one in Woolworth’s,’ I say. A photograph! Thus far the affair has been vague, nothing to do with my real life, as insubstantial as a dream. It will be a simple trick to persuade myself that it never happened. But a photograph! Our faces fixed, cheek by cheek, our relationship projected into the foreseeable future. Proof snatched from the lethal fingers of time.

  The booth is already occupied by three small boys. We can see their legs, and hear their excited giggling. Then as the first flash fades we hear, above their laughter, the screech of a creature in terror. Inge tears back the curtain and exposes the boys, including one who is dangling a kitten by its tail in front of the camera. The kitten flails about uselessly, tensing and squealing with horror at each flash, only to redouble its efforts in the lacuna. ‘You monsters,’ cries Inge, ‘stop torturing that poor animal.’ The boys grin. The kitten swings. Faster and faster. Until the boy lets go. The kitten lands on Inge’s shoulder. Seeking to steady itself it raises its paw and sinks its claw into her ear. Inge gently lifts the kitten so her ear is not torn although the lobe is pierced and bleeding profusely, staining her tee-shirt a deeper red. I give her my handkerchief to press against the wound. ‘It looks worse than it is,’ says Inge, ‘it does not hurt.’ ‘Nevertheless, you must come back to our house,’ I say, ‘you must wash and change. You can’t go around covered in blood.’ Once again a curious accident has left me with no choice. Inge will meet my wife.

  We surprise my wife sunbathing naked in the garden. ‘Hello love,’ she says, ‘I didn’t know you were bringing somebody back with you.’ ‘Only one of my students,’ I say, ‘she’s been wounded.’ My wife, wrapping a towel around herself, approaches Inge and leads her off to the bathroom. They reappear in identical cotton shirts, bargains from the market. A stranger might take them for sisters. I cook omelettes for lunch, with a few beans from the garden, and serve them on the lawn where my wife had been alone less than an hour before. I am astonished how relaxed we all are. Inge rattles off examples of her lover’s male chauvinism. We all laugh. I feel no guilt, my wife feels no pain. She suspects nothing. She waves the flies from our food and throws breadcrumbs down for the sparrows. ‘Are you enjoying the course?’ she asks. ‘Very much,’ says Inge, ‘especially our little playwriting group. Has Joshua told you about our play? Yes? Of course. You must come to our cabaret and see it performed.’ ‘I shall look forward to that,’ says my wife. She removes the plates and returns with a bowl of peaches. They are sweet and juicy and attract many wasps. Our fingers become sticky. ‘I am glad everything is going so well,’ says my wife, ‘without any problems.’ ‘Only the bedbugs.’ I say, ‘look what they’ve done to my arms.’ ‘Poor thing,’ says my wife, ‘can’t you move into a different room?’ ‘No need,’ I say, ‘they’ve been exterminated.’ My wife smiles. What contentment! I realize now why I feel so untroubled; I do not really believe that I have made love to Inge. She is what she seems, just a visitor. My wife is my wife. We belong. Cambridge is a foreign city. To which I must return, however. I kiss my wife. ‘See you on Wednesday,’ I say. ‘What a nuisance,’ says Inge as the coach passes our house, ‘I have left my scarf behind.’ ‘Never mind,’ I say, ‘I’ll pick it up on Wednesday. Besides you can hardly see the bites now.’

  On Tuesday we complete the play. In the evening the heatwave breaks with a tremendous storm. Knowing how much my wife dreads thunder I telephone her. She does not answer. Later, when the rain has stopped, Inge and I stroll to the Castle to toast our success. Afterwards we return to my room, where Inge now sleeps as a matter of course. In the morning I telephone my wife again. No reply. Probably shopping. Lunch over, teaching being at an end, I drive home to collect her. There are three milk bottles on the doorstep, the first already sour. Its top is off, filling the stagnant air with its nauseous odour. Within is a different smell, naggingly familiar. I shout my wife’s name. But there is no response. The house seems deserted. Bedrooms, bathroom, dining room, all empty. On the table is Inge’s black scarf, neatly folded, and a note:

  Don’t forget this, Love Rachel

  PS. Hope the bedbugs have stopped biting Inge.

  Then in the kitchen I realize what the smell reminds me of. A butcher’s shop. Naked, legs splayed, my wife sits upon the kitchen floor with the wooden handle of our carving knife protruding from her belly. Her back rests against the wall, her arms hang stiffly down, her eyes are open wide. The blood is dry. It flowed down from her wound, between her thighs, and formed puddles on the floor. The only sound is the buzzing of flies. They walk upon her breasts, mass around her vagina where the hair is matted with blood. This horror is too shocking to be true! It is a phantasmagoria produced by my conscience. Art, not life.

  ‘Your face is very white,’ says Inge, ‘is everything all right?’ ‘I’m just nervous about this evening,’ I say. We have gathered all the props we require; cutlery, crockery, sauce bottles, and a starting pistol loaded with blanks. And while Monika – of all people – strips down to her underwear in front of the directors of Literature & Linguistics Ltd Inge and I exchange clothes. A suit and tie for her, a dress for me. ‘This is Cambridge,’ I think, ‘this is my life. There is nothing else.’ We hear Franz sing his folk songs. Then applause. We are joined by the third member of the cast. We walk out to cheers and laughter. ‘Your wife is in the audience?’ asks Inge. ‘I hope so,’ I say, ‘she is coming by train.’ The play begins.

  Inge – my husband – is a bank clerk. I am a housewife. The other girl is a television set. Inge orders me to switch her on. We hear the news. I serve dinner to my husband and our two children who are invisible. An argument develops between us over the boy’s long curls. ‘You’ll turn your son into a pansy with your ways of bringing him up,’ yells Inge. ‘They’re always my children when there is something the matter,’ I shout, ‘I don’t think you really wanted them. I won’t forget how you treated me when I was pregnant. You didn’t even try to hide your disgust. But you’re the one who’s disgusting!’ What am I talking about? Why am I pretending to be my wife? Wife? I have no wife. How these silly words have confused me! What next? Oh yes, I am supposed to take the gun from my handbag. I point the gun at Inge. Why? Because I hate her. But why? Because she seduced me? Because she murdered my wife? Wife? I can’t even remember her name. With her shirt and tie and pencil moustache Inge looks like a creature from pre-war Berlin. I hate her because she is German. A Nazi! I fire the gun. The blast fills my head. ‘Daughter of Germany!’ I scream. ‘Daughter of Germany!’ I shoot at her until the gun is empty.

  * * *

  GRAHAM SWIFT

  * * *

  SER
AGLIO

  In Istanbul there are tombs, faced with calligraphic designs, where the dead Sultan rests among the tiny catafalques of younger brothers whom he was obliged, by custom, to murder on his accession. Beauty becomes callous when it is set beside savagery. In the grounds of the Topkapi palace the tourists admire the turquoise tiles of the Harem, the Kiosks of the Sultans, and think of girls with sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains. ‘So were they just kept here?’ my wife asks. I read from the guide-book: ‘Though the Sultans kept theoretical power over the Harem, by the end of the sixteenth century these women effectively dominated the Sultans.’

  It is cold. A chill wind blows from the Bosphorus. We had come on our trip in late March, expecting sunshine and mild heat, and found bright days rent by squalls and hail-storms. When it rains in Istanbul the narrow streets below the Bazaar become torrents, impossible to walk through, on which one expects to see, floating with the debris of the market, dead rats, bloated dogs, the washed up corpses of centuries. The Bazaar itself is a labyrinth with a history of fires. People have entered, they say, and not emerged.

  From the grounds of the Topkapi the skyline of the city, like an array of upturned shields and spears, is unreal. The tourists murmur, pass on. Turbans, fountains; the quarters of the Eunuchs; the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle. Images out of the Arabian Nights. Then one discovers, as if stumbling oneself on the scene of the crime, in a glass case in a museum of robes, the spattered kaftan in which Sultan Oman II was assassinated. Rent by dagger thrusts from shoulder to hip. The thin linen fabric could be the corpse itself. The simple white garment, like a bathrobe, the blood-stains, like the brown stains on the gauze of a removed elastoplast, give you the momentary illusion that it is your gown lying there, lent to another, who is murdered in mistake for yourself.

  We leave, towards the Blue Mosque, through the Imperial Gate, past the fountain of the Executioner. City of monuments and murder, in which cruelty seems ignored. There are cripples in the streets near the Bazaar, shuffling on leather pads, whom the tourists notice but the inhabitants do not. City of siege and massacre and magnificence. When Mehmet the Conqueror captured the city in 1453 he gave it over to his men, as was the custom, for three days of pillage and slaughter; then set about building new monuments. These things are in the travel books. The English-speaking guides, not using their own language, tell them as if they had never happened. There are miniatures of Mehmet in the Topkapi Museum. A pale, smooth-skinned man, a patron of the arts, with a sensitive gaze and delicate eyebrows, holding a rose to his nostrils…

  It was after I had been explaining to my wife from the guide-book, over lunch in a restaurant, about Mehmet’s rebuilding of the city, that we walked round a corner and saw a taxi – one of those metallic green taxis with black and yellow chequers down the side which cruise round Istanbul like turquoise sharks – drive with almost deliberate casualness into the legs of a man pushing a cart by the kerb. A slight crunch; the man fell, his legs at odd angles, clothes torn, and did not get up. Such things should not happen on holiday. They happen at home – people cluster round and stare – and you accommodate it because you know ordinary life includes such things. On holiday you want to be spared ordinary life.

  But then it was not the fact of the accident for which we were unprepared but the reactions of the involved parties. The injured man looked as if he were to blame for having been injured. The taxi driver remained in his car as if his path had been deliberately blocked. People stopped on the pavement and gabbled, but seemed to be talking about something else. A policeman crossed from a traffic island. He had dark glasses and a peaked cap. The taxi driver got out of his car. They spoke languidly to each other and seemed both to have decided to ignore the man on the road. Beneath his dark glasses the policeman’s lips moved delicately and almost with a smile, as if he were smelling a flower. We walked on round the corner. I said to my wife, even though I knew she would disapprove of the joke: ‘That’s why there are so many cripples.’

  Our hotel is in the new part of Istanbul, near the Hilton, overlooking the Bosphorus, across which there is a newly built bridge. Standing on the balcony you can look from Europe to Asia. Uskudar, on the other side, is associated with Florence Nightingale. There are few places in the world where, poised on one continent, you can gaze over a strip of water at another.

  We had wanted something more exotic. No more Alpine chalets and villas in Spain. We needed yet another holiday, but a different holiday. We had had this need for eight years and it was a need we could afford. We felt we had suffered in the past and so required a perpetual convalescence. But this meant, in time, even our holidays lacked novelty; so we looked for somewhere more exotic. We thought of the East. We imagined a landscape of minarets and domes out of the Arabian Nights. However, I pointed out the political uncertainties of the Middle East to my wife. She is sensitive to such things, to even remote hints of calamity. In London bombs go off in the Hilton and restaurants in Mayfair. Because she has borne one disaster she feels she should be spared all others, and she looks upon me to be her guide in this.

  ‘Well Turkey then – Istanbul,’ she said – we had the brochures open on the table, with their photographs of the Blue Mosque – ‘that’s not the Middle East.’ I remarked (facetiously perhaps: I make these digs at my wife and she appreciates them for they reassure her that she is not being treated like something fragile) that the Turks made trouble too; they had invaded Cyprus.

  ‘Don’t you remember the Hamiltons’ villa? They’re still waiting to know what’s become of it.’

  ‘But we’re not going to Cyprus,’ she said. And then, looking at the brochure – as if her adventurousness were being tested and she recognized its limits: ‘Besides, Istanbul is in Europe.’

  My wife is beautiful. She has a smooth, flawless complexion, subtle, curiously expressive eyebrows, and a slender figure. I think these were the things which made me want to marry her, but though they have preserved themselves well in eight years they no longer have the force of a motive. She looks best in very dark or very pale colours. She is fastidious about perfumes, and tends devotedly our garden in Surrey.

  She is lying now on the bed in our hotel bedroom in Istanbul from which you can see Asia, and she is crying. She is crying because while I have been out taking photos, in the morning light, of the Bosphorus, something has happened – she has been interfered with in some way – between her and one of the hotel porters.

  I sit down beside her. I do not know exactly what has happened. It is difficult to elicit details while she is crying. However, I am thinking: She only started to cry when I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ When I came into the room she was not crying, only sitting stiller and paler than usual. This seems to me like a kind of obstructiveness.

  ‘We must get the manager,’ I say, getting up, ‘the police even.’ I say this bluffly, even a little heartlessly; partly because I believe my wife may be dramatizing, exaggerating (she has been moody, touchy ever since that accident we witnessed: perhaps she is blowing up some small thing, a mistake, nothing at all); partly because I know that if my wife had come out with me to take photos and not remained alone none of this would have occurred; but partly too because as I stare down at her and mention the police, I want her to think of the policeman with his dark glasses and his half-smiling lips and the man with his legs crooked on the road. I see that she does so by the wounded look she gives me. This wounds me in return for having caused it. But I had wanted this too.

  ‘No,’ she says, shaking her head, still sobbing. I see that she is not sobered by my remark. Perhaps there is something there. She wants to accuse me, with her look, of being cold and sensible and wanting to pass the matter on, of not caring for her distress itself.

  ‘But you won’t tell me exactly what happened,’ I say, as if I am being unfairly treated.

  She reaches for her handkerchief and blows her nose deliberately. When my wife cries or laughs her eyebrows form little waves. While her face is buried in the handk
erchief I look up out of the window. A mosque on the Asian side, its minarets like thin blades, is visible on the skyline. With the morning light behind it, it seems illusory, like a cut-out. I try to recall its name from the guide-book but cannot. I look back at my wife. She has removed the handkerchief from her eyes. I realize she is right in reproaching me for my callousness. But this process of being harsh towards my wife’s suffering, as if I blamed her for it, so that I in turn will feel to blame and she will then feel justified in pleading her suffering, is familiar. It is the only way in which we begin to speak freely.

  She is about to tell me what happened now. She crushes the handkerchief in her hand. I realize I really have been behaving as if nothing had happened.

  When I married my wife I had just landed a highly sought-after job. I am a consultant designer. I had everything and, I told myself, I was in love. In order to prove this to myself I had an affair, six months after my marriage, with a girl I did not love. We made love in hotels. In the West there are no harems. Perhaps my wife found out or guessed what had happened, but she gave no sign and I betrayed nothing. I wonder if a person does not know something has happened, if it is the same as if nothing had happened. My affair did not affect in any way the happiness I felt in my marriage. My wife became pregnant. I was glad of this. I stopped seeing the girl. Then some months later my wife had a miscarriage. She not only lost the baby, but could not have children again.