The Collected Short Stories

by Jean Rhys

  ‘Not Torrington Square,’ he shouted through the window.

  The taxi drew up.

  ‘Damn his eyes, what’s he done that for?’

  The driver got down and opened the door.

  ‘Here, where am I going to? This is the third time you’ve changed your mind since you ’ailed me.’

  ‘You’ll go where you’re damn well told.’

  ‘Well where am I damn well told?’

  ‘Go to Marble Arch.’

  ‘’Yde Park,’ the driver said, looking us up and down and grinning broadly. Then he got back into his seat.

  ‘I can’t bear some of these chaps, can you?’ the young man said.

  When the taxi stopped at the end of Park Lane we both got out without a word. The driver looked us up and down again scornfully before he started away.

  ‘What do you want to do in Hyde Park? Look at the trees?’

  He took my suitcase and walked along by my side.

  ‘Yes, I want to look at the trees and not go back to the place where I live. Never go back.’

  ‘I’ve never lived in a place I like,’ I thought, ‘never.’

  ‘That does sound desperate. Well, let’s see if we can find a secluded spot.’

  ‘That chair over there will do,’ I said. It was away from people under a tree. Not that people mattered much, for now it was night and they are never so frightening then.

  I shut my eyes so that I could hear and smell the trees better. I imagined I could smell water too. The Serpentine – I didn’t know we had walked so far.

  He said, ‘I can’t leave you so disconsolate on this lovely night – this night of love and night of stars.’ He gave a loud hiccup, and then another. ‘That always happens when I’ve eaten quails.’

  ‘It happens to me when I’m tight.’

  ‘Does it?’ He pulled another chair forward and sat down by my side. ‘I can’t leave you now until I know where you’re going with that large suitcase and that desperate expression.’

  I told him that I had just come back after a stay in the country, and he told me that he did not live in London, that his name was Melville and that he was at a loose end that evening.

  ‘Did somebody let you down?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not important – not half so important as the desperate expression. I noticed that as soon as I saw you.’

  ‘That’s not despair, it’s hunger,’ I said, dropping into the backchat. ‘Don’t you know hunger when you see it?’

  ‘Well, let’s go and have something to eat, then. But where?’ He looked at me uncertainly. ‘Where?’

  ‘We could go to the Apple Tree. Of course, it’s a bit early, but we might be able to get kippers or eggs and bacon or sausages and mash.’

  ‘The Apple Tree? I’ve heard of it. Could we go there?’ he said, still eyeing me.

  ‘We could indeed. You could come as my guest. I’m a member. I was one of the first members,’ I boasted.

  I had touched the right spring – even the feeling of his hand on my arm changed. Always the same spring to touch before the sneering expression will go out of their eyes and the sneering sound out of their voices. Think about it – it’s very important.

  ‘Lots of pretty girls at the Apple Tree, aren’t there?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t promise anything. It’s a bad time of year for the Apple Tree, the singing and the gold.’

  ‘Now what are you talking about?’

  ‘Somebody I know calls it that.’

  ‘But you’ll be there.’ He pulled his chair closer and looked round cautiously before he kissed me. ‘And you’re an awfully pretty girl, aren’t you? . . . The Apple Tree, the singing and the gold. I like that.’

  ‘Better than “Night of love and night of stars”?’

  ‘Oh, they’re not in the same street.’

  I thought, ‘How do you know what’s in what street? How do they know who’s fifth-rate, who’s fifth-rate and where the devouring spider lives?’

  ‘You don’t really mind where we go, do you?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t mind at all.’

  He took his arm away. ‘It was odd our meeting like that, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think it was odd at all.’

  After a silence, ‘I haven’t been very swift in the uptake, have I?’ he said.

  ‘No, you haven’t. Now, let’s be off to the Apple Tree, the singing and the gold.’

  ‘Oh, damn the Apple Tree. I know a better place than that.’

  ‘I’ve been persuaded to taste it before,’ Marston said. ‘It tasted exactly as I thought it would.’

  And everything was exactly as I had expected. The knowing waiters, the touch of the ice-cold wine glass, the red plush chairs, the food you don’t notice, the gold-framed mirror, the bed in the room beyond that always looks as if its ostentatious whiteness hides dinginess.

  But Marston should have said, ‘It tastes of nothing, my dear, it tastes of nothing . . .’

  When we got out into Leicester Square again I had forgotten Marston and only thought about how, when we had nothing better to do, Estelle and I would go to the Corner House or to some cheap restaurant in Soho and have dinner. She was so earnest when it came to food. ‘You must have one good meal a day,’ she would say, ‘it is necessary.’ Escalope de veau and fried potatoes and brussels sprouts, we usually had, and then crème caramel or compôte de fruits. And she seemed to be walking along by my side, wearing her blue suit and her white blouse, her high heels tapping. But as we turned the corner by the Hippodrome she vanished. I thought, ‘I shall never see her again – I know it.’

  In the taxi he said, ‘I don’t forget addresses, do I?’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  To keep myself awake I began to sing ‘Mr Brown, Mr Brown, Had a violin . . .’

  ‘Are you on the stage?’

  ‘I was. I started my brilliant and successful career like so many others, in the chorus. But I wasn’t a success.’

  ‘What a shame! Why?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t say “epigrammatic”.’

  He laughed – really laughed that time.

  ‘The stage manager had the dotty idea of pulling me out of my obscurity and giving me a line to say. The line was “Oh, Lottie, Lottie, don’t be epigrammatic”. I rehearsed it and rehearsed it, but when it came to the night it was just a blank.’

  At the top of Charing Cross Road the taxi was held up. We were both laughing so much that people turned round and stared at us.

  ‘It was one of the most dreadful moments of my life, and I shan’t ever forget it. There was the stage manager, mouthing at me from the wings – he was the prompter too and he also played a small part, the family lawyer – and there he was all dressed up in grey-striped trousers and a black tail-coat and top hat and silver side-whiskers, and there I was, in a yellow dress and a large straw hat and a green sunshade and a lovely background of an English castle and garden – half ruined and half not, you know – and a chorus of footmen and maids, and my mind a complete blank.’

  The taxi started again. ‘Well, what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. After one second the other actors went smoothly on. I remember the next line. It was “Going to Ascot? Well, if you don’t get into the Royal Enclosure when you are there I’m no judge of character.”’

  ‘But what about the audience?’

  ‘Oh, the audience weren’t surprised because, you see, they had never expected me to speak at all. Well, here we are.’

  I gave him my latchkey and he opened the door.

  ‘A formidable key! It’s like the key of a prison,’ he said.

  Everyone had gone to bed and there wasn’t even a ghost of Estelle’s scent in the hall.

  ‘We must see each other again,’ he said. ‘Please. Couldn’t you write to me at –’ He stopped. ‘No, I’ll write to you. If you’re ever – I’ll write to you anyway.’

  I said, ‘Do you know what I want? I want a gold bracelet with b
lue stones in it. Not too blue – the darker blue I prefer.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ He was wary again. ‘I’ll do my best, but I’m not one of these plutocrats, you know.’

  ‘Don’t you dare to come back without it. But I’m going away for a few weeks. I’ll be here again in September.’

  ‘All right, I’ll see you in September, Petronella,’ he said chirpily, anxious to be off. ‘And you’ve been so sweet to me.’

  ‘The pleasure was all mine.’

  He shook his head. ‘Now, Lottie, Lottie, don’t be epigrammatic.’

  I thought, ‘I daresay he would be nice if one got to know him. I daresay, perhaps . . .’ listening to him tapping good-bye on the other side of the door. I tapped back twice and then started up the stairs. Past the door of Estelle’s room, not feeling a thing as I passed it, because she had gone and I knew she would not ever come back.

  In my room I stood looking out of the window, remembering my yellow dress, the blurred mass of the audience and the face of one man in the front row seen quite clearly, and how I thought, as quick as lightning, ‘Help me, tell me what I have forgotten.’ But though he had looked, as it seemed, straight into my eyes, and though I was sure he knew exactly what I was thinking, he had not helped me. He had only smiled. He had left me in that moment that seemed like years standing there until through the dreadful blankness of my mind I had heard a high, shrill, cockney voice saying, ‘Going to Ascot?’ and seen the stage manager frown and shake his head at me.

  ‘My God, I must have looked a fool,’ I thought, laughing and feeling the tears running down my face.

  ‘What a waste of good tears!’ the other girls had told me when I cried in the dressing-room that night. ‘Oh, the waste, the waste, the waste!’

  But that did not last long.

  ‘What’s the time?’ I thought, and because I wasn’t sleepy any longer I sat down in the chair by the window, waiting for the clock outside to strike.

  The Day They Burned the Books

  My friend Eddie was a small, thin boy. You could see the blue veins in his wrists and temples. People said that he had consumption and wasn’t long for this world. I loved, but sometimes despised him.

  His father, Mr Sawyer, was a strange man. Nobody could make out what he was doing in our part of the world at all. He was not a planter or a doctor or a lawyer or a banker. He didn’t keep a store. He wasn’t a schoolmaster or a government official. He wasn’t – that was the point – a gentleman. We had several resident romantics who had fallen in love with the moon on the Caribees – they were all gentlemen and quite unlike Mr Sawyer who hadn’t an ‘h’ in his composition. Besides, he detested the moon and everything else about the Caribbean and he didn’t mind telling you so.

  He was agent for a small steamship line which in those days linked up Venezuela and Trinidad with the smaller islands, but he couldn’t make much out of that. He must have a private income, people decided, but they never decided why he had chosen to settle in a place he didn’t like and to marry a coloured woman. Though a decent, respectable, nicely educated coloured woman, mind you.

  Mrs Sawyer must have been very pretty once but, what with one thing and another, that was in days gone by.

  When Mr Sawyer was drunk – this often happened – he used to be very rude to her. She never answered him.

  ‘Look at the nigger showing off,’ he would say; and she would smile as if she knew she ought to see the joke but couldn’t. ‘You damned, long-eyed, gloomy half-caste, you don’t smell right,’ he would say; and she never answered, not even to whisper, ‘You don’t smell right to me, either.’

  The story went that once they had ventured to give a dinner party and that when the servant, Mildred, was bringing in coffee, he had pulled Mrs Sawyer’s hair. ‘Not a wig, you see,’ he bawled. Even then, if you can believe it, Mrs Sawyer had laughed and tried to pretend that it was all part of the joke, this mysterious, obscure, sacred English joke.

  But Mildred told the other servants in the town that her eyes had gone wicked, like a soucriant’s eyes, and that afterwards she had picked up some of the hair he pulled out and put it in an envelope, and that Mr Sawyer ought to look out (hair is obeah as well as hands).

  Of course, Mrs Sawyer had her compensations. They lived in a very pleasant house in Hill Street. The garden was large and they had a fine mango tree, which bore prolifically. The fruit was small, round, very sweet and juicy – a lovely, red-and-yellow colour when it was ripe. Perhaps it was one of the compensations, I used to think.

  Mr Sawyer built a room on to the back of this house. It was unpainted inside and the wood smelt very sweet. Bookshelves lined the walls. Every time the Royal Mail steamer came in it brought a package for him, and gradually the empty shelves filled.

  Once I went there with Eddie to borrow The Arabian Nights. That was on a Saturday afternoon, one of those hot, still afternoons when you felt that everything had gone to sleep, even the water in the gutters. But Mrs Sawyer was not asleep. She put her head in at the door and looked at us, and I knew that she hated the room and hated the books.

  It was Eddie with the pale blue eyes and straw-coloured hair – the living image of his father, though often as silent as his mother – who first infected me with doubts about ‘home’, meaning England. He would be so quiet when others who had never seen it – none of us had ever seen it – were talking about its delights, gesticulating freely as we talked – London, the beautiful, rosy-cheeked ladies, the theatres, the shops, the fog, the blazing coal fires in winter, the exotic food (whitebait eaten to the sound of violins), strawberries and cream – the word ‘strawberries’ always spoken with a guttural and throaty sound which we imagined to be the proper English pronunciation.

  ‘I don’t like strawberries,’ Eddie said on one occasion.

  ‘You don’t like strawberries?’

  ‘No, and I don’t like daffodils either. Dad’s always going on about them. He says they lick the flowers here into a cocked hat and I bet that’s a lie.’

  We were all too shocked to say, ‘You don’t know a thing about it.’ We were so shocked that nobody spoke to him for the rest of the day. But I for one admired him. I also was tired of learning and reciting poems in praise of daffodils, and my relations with the few ‘real’ English boys and girls I had met were awkward. I had discovered that if I called myself English they would snub me haughtily: ‘You’re not English; you’re a horrid colonial.’ ‘Well, I don’t much want to be English,’ I would say. ‘It’s much more fun to be French or Spanish or something like that – and, as a matter of fact, I am a bit.’ Then I was too killingly funny, quite ridiculous. Not only a horrid colonial, but also ridiculous. Heads I win, tails you lose – that was the English. I had thought about all this, and thought hard, but I had never dared to tell anybody what I thought and I realized that Eddie had been very bold.

  But he was bold, and stronger than you would think. For one thing, he never felt the heat; some coldness in his fair skin resisted it. He didn’t burn red or brown, he didn’t freckle much.

  Hot days seemed to make him feel especially energetic. ‘Now we’ll run twice round the lawn and then you can pretend you’re dying of thirst in the desert and that I’m an Arab chieftain bringing you water.

  ‘You must drink slowly,’ he would say, ‘for if you’re very thirsty and you drink quickly you die.’

  So I learnt the voluptuousness of drinking slowly when you are very thirsty – small mouthful by small mouthful, until the glass of pink, iced Coca-Cola was empty.

  Just after my twelfth birthday Mr Sawyer died suddenly, and as Eddie’s special friend I went to the funeral, wearing a new white dress. My straight hair was damped with sugar and water the night before and plaited into tight little plaits, so that it should be fluffy for the occasion.

  When it was all over everybody said how nice Mrs Sawyer had looked, walking like a queen behind the coffin and crying her eyeballs out at the right moment, and wasn’t Eddie a funny boy? He hadn’t
cried at all.

  After this Eddie and I took possession of the room with the books. No one else ever entered it, except Mildred to sweep and dust in the mornings, and gradually the ghost of Mr Sawyer pulling Mrs Sawyer’s hair faded, though this took a little time. The blinds were always halfway down and going in out of the sun was like stepping into a pool of brown-green water. It was empty except for the bookshelves, a desk with a green baize top and a wicker rocking-chair.

  ‘My room,’ Eddie called it. ‘My books,’ he would say, ‘my books.’

  I don’t know how long this lasted. I don’t know whether it was weeks after Mr Sawyer’s death or months after, that I see myself and Eddie in the room. But there we are and there, unexpectedly, are Mrs Sawyer and Mildred. Mrs Sawyer’s mouth tight, her eyes pleased. She is pulling all the books out of the shelves and piling them into two heaps. The big, fat glossy ones – the good-looking ones, Mildred explains in a whisper – lie in one heap. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, British Flowers, Birds and Beasts, various histories, books with maps, Froude’s English in the West Indies and so on – they are going to be sold. The unimportant books, with paper covers or damaged covers or torn pages, lie in another heap. They are going to be burnt – yes, burnt.

  Mildred’s expression was extraordinary as she said that – half hugely delighted, half shocked, even frightened. And as for Mrs Sawyer – well, I knew bad temper (I had often seen it), I knew rage, but this was hate. I recognized the difference at once and stared at her curiously. I edged closer to her so that I could see the titles of the books she was handling.

  It was the poetry shelf. Poems, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, Milton, and so on. Vlung, vlung, vlung – all thrown into the heap that were to be sold. But a book by Christina Rossetti, though also bound in leather, went into the heap that was to be burnt, and by a flicker in Mrs Sawyer’s eyes I knew that worse than men who wrote books were women who wrote books – infinitely worse. Men could be mercifully shot; women must be tortured.

  Mrs Sawyer did not seem to notice that we were there, but she was breathing free and easy and her hands had got the rhythm of tearing and pitching. She looked beautiful, too – beautiful as the sky outside which was a very dark blue, or the mango tree, long sprays of brown and gold.