The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

Without turning around I saw reflected in her eyes the sky-blue bones of his skull head, and the fixed grin of the victory I’d been forced to give him.

  I mimicked her: ‘Guess what he’s mimicking?’ and didn’t give her time to answer. ‘A corpse,’ I said, forcing her gently aside, opening the door, and walking away.

  Between bouts of mimicking one person and another, my entity becomes blank. To be able to mimic someone I had to like them. That was the first rule, just as, in the reverse sense, in order to love someone you have to be able to mimic them. When I mimicked people now, they ceased to like me, if they had ever done so. But then, treachery always begins with a kiss. For these reasons I had found it impossible to imitate God, and not only because I’d never seen Him.

  Later, in my isolation, I only mimicked people to myself instead of out loud or for the benefit of others. Don’t force the pace. This isn’t a story. Switch off if you’re not with me. I’ll go on as long as you can, if not longer. I’ve had everything: booze, pot, shock, solitary. Yet though I may be sane, and a mimic of the world, can I imitate Mr Sand or Mr Water, Mr Cloud or Mr Sky with sufficient conviction to become all of them rolled into one realistic and convincing ball?

  I mimic myself trying to mimic myself when I don’t know who I am or what my real self is. I sit on my own in a pub laughing inwardly because I am more king of the world than anyone else. I see faces around me both troubled and serene, and don’t know which one to choose for the great grand mimic of the night. I give up trying to mimic myself, and choose a man talking earnestly to his wife. I stand in the middle of the floor. Everything is clear and steady, but no one looks at me. I talk as if the man’s wife were standing two inches from my face, grinning at the jokes I’m (he’s) obviously making, then looking slow-eyed and glum when she mentions the children. Somebody pushes by with an empty glass as if I don’t exist. I pull him back and he knocks me down. I do exist. I live, and smile on the floor before getting up. But only he notices me, and does so no more as his glass is filled and he steps by me back to his table. It is quite a disturbance, but they don’t even call the police.

  Was Jean’s new man mimicking himself, or was it me? I shall never know. But I would not see her again, even though she might want to take up with me. She’d been in contact with evil, and the evil had rubbed off on to her. Some of it in that short time had jumped to me and I was already trying to fight free of it.

  When I was mimicking someone I was walking parallel with the frontiers of madness. When I did it marvellously well, the greater was the drop of madness below me. But I didn’t know this. I was driven to mimicry by threat and fear of madness. For some months I totally lost the skill to mimic, and that’s why I got a note from my doctor and presented myself at the door of the local head-hospital. They welcomed me with open arms, and I was able to begin making notes from the seven millionth bed.

  I did well there, announced to all assembled that I was now going to put on a show of mimicking Doctor So-and-so, and what to me was a brilliant act for them turned out to be perfectly still flesh and a blank stare from a person who was me in the middle of the room.

  I had to start again, from the beginning. In order to imitate a sneeze I was thrown on to the floor by the force of it. I turned into a dog down one side of my face, and a moth on the other.

  As I came up from the pit I started to write these notes. I have written them out five times already, and on each occasion they have been snatched from me by the attendant and burned. While I write I am quiet; when I stop, I rave. That is why they are taken from me.

  II

  I didn’t stay long: it took me two years to recover. To imitate was like learning to speak again. But my soul was filled with iron, and I went on and on. The whole world was inside of me, and on any stage I chose I performed my masterpiece of mimicry. These were merely rehearsals for when I actually figured as the same person over and over again, a calm, precise, reasonable man who bore no relation to the real me seething like a malt-vat inside. The select audience appreciated my effort. I don’t think anything was lost on them, except perhaps the truth.

  No one can mimic time and make it go away, as one can sometimes make friends and enemies alike disappear when you mimic them. I had to sit with time, feed it my bones in daylight and darkness.

  This great creation of mine, that I dredged up so painfully from the bottom of my soul, was someone I’d sidestepped from birth. I breathed life in him, a task as hard as if he were a stone, yet I had to perfect him and make him live, because in the looney bin I realized the trap I’d walked into.

  I made a successful imitation of a sane man, and then they let me out. It felt like the greatest day of my life. I do not think my performance could have been better than it was.

  An insane man can vanish like a fish in water, and hide anywhere. I am not insane, and it was never my intention to become so. But one is forced to mimic to perfection a sane man so as to become free, and what greater insanity is there than that? Yet it widens the horizons of the heart, which is no bad thing for someone who was born a mimic.

  Years have passed, and in my pursuit and mimicry of sanity I have become the assistant manager of a large office. I am thirty-five years of age, and never married again. I took some winter leave and went to Switzerland. Don’t ask me why – that means you, the one I’m imitating, and you, who I am not. I planned the space off work and set off for London with my pocket full of traveller’s cheques and a passport. In my rucksack was a hammock, nylon groundsheet, blanket, tobacco, matches, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, compass, a book, notebook, and pencils. That’s all. I don’t remember where I got such a list from but I did, and stuck to it religiously. I was determined that every action from now on should have some meaning, just as in the past every time I had ever mimicked anyone had also had some important significance. One cannot live in the world of chance. If fate will not act for you, then take it by the neck.

  It was so cold I thought my head would break like an old teapot, but as I walked away from the lake and along the narrow road between banks of trees I got used to it. The walls of the mountains on either side were so steep it seemed that if anybody were foolhardy enough to climb up they would fall off and down – unless they were a fly. Perhaps I could mimic a fly, since already in the cold I had conjured a burning stove into my belly. A car passed and offered me a lift. I waved it on.

  It was getting dark by five, and there wasn’t much snow to be seen, a large sheet of luminous basilisk blue overhead, and behind me to the south a map-patch of dying fluorescent pink. The air was pure, you could certainly say that for it. The sun must have given the valley an hour each day, then a last wink before it vanished on its way to America.

  There was snow underfoot, at certain higher places off the road, good clean snow that you could eat with honey on it. I could not see such snow and fading sun without death coming into my heart, the off-white powder humps in the dusk thrown between rock and tree-boles, flecked among the grey and scattered rooftops of a village I was coming to.

  Bells were sounding from the church, a leisurely mellow music coming across the snow, so welcoming that they made me think that maybe I had had a childhood after all. I walked up the steep narrow lanes, slipping on the snow hardened into beds of ice. No one was about, though lights were in the windows of dark wooden houses.

  Along one lane was a larger building of plain brick, and I went inside for something to eat. A girl stood by the counter, and said good evening in Italian. I took off my pack and overcoat, and she pointed to tables set in the room behind.

  They did not ask me what I wanted but brought soup, then roast meat, bread, and cabbage. I gave in my passport, intending to stay the night. A woman walked in, tall, blonde, rawboned, and blue-eyed. She sat at another table, and fed half her meal to the cat. After my long trek from the railway station (stopping only in the town to buy a map) I was starving, and had eyes for nothing but my food. The first part of the walk was agony. I creaked like an old man,
but now, in spite of my exhaustion, I felt I could walk on through the night.

  I did not sleep well. In dreams I began to feel myself leaving the world. My hand was small and made of copper, tiny (like hammers that broke toffee when I was a child), and I placed it on my head that was immense and made of concrete, solid, but that suddenly started to get smaller. This was beginning to be an actual physical state, so I opened my eyes to fight it off. If I didn’t I saw myself being pressed and squeezed into extinction, out of the world. It didn’t seem as if I would go mad (nothing is that simple) but that I would be killed by this attrition of total insecurity. It seemed as if the earth were about to turn into concrete and roll over my body.

  I got out of bed and dressed. The air in the room, which had firmly shut double windows and radiators, was stifling. When you think you’re going mad it’s a sign you’re getting over it. The faces of everyone I’d ever mimicked or made love to fell to pieces in turn like a breaking jigsaw puzzle.

  My boots bit into the snow as I closed the door behind. It wasn’t yet midnight. There was a distinct ring around the full and brilliant moon. There was snow on the mountain sides, and it seemed as if just over the line of their crests a neon light was shining. I walked along the lanes of the village, in the scorching frosty cold.

  To question why one is alive means that one is only half a person, but to be a whole person is to be half dead.

  Sun was shining over the snow next morning as I sat by the window drinking coffee. I was near the head of the valley, and the mountain slopes opened out. Most of it was sombre forest with occasional outcrops of rock, but to the west, at a place shone on directly by the sun, I could see green space. Then nothing but rock and snow, and blue sky. My eyes were always good. I never needed glasses or binoculars, and just above the meadow before the trees began was a small hut. No smoke came from it.

  I paid my bill, collected my pack, and said good-bye. At the road a cow had been hit by a car and lay dying. The car’s headlamp was shattered and the animal lay in a pool of blood, moving its hoofs slightly. A group of people stood around, and the driver was showing his papers. Another man rested a notebook on the car-top to write. It was all very orderly. I pushed through and looked into the eyes of the dying animal. It did not understand. As a last gesture it bellowed, but no one was interested in it, because the end was certain. No one even heard it, I was sure. The damson eyes were full of the non-comprehension of understanding.

  The mountains were reflected in one, and the village in the other – or so it seemed as I paced back and forth. Another bellow sounded, even after it was dead, and when all the people looked at me at last to make sure that the noise was coming from me and not out of the sky, I walked on alone up the road, away from the spoiled territory of the heart, and the soiled landscape of the soul.

  I am wild. If I lift up my eyes to the hills a child cries. A child crying makes me sad. A baby crying puts me into a rage against it. I imagine everything. If I go into the hills and sit there, birds sing. They are made of frost, like the flowers. Insanity means freedom, nothing else. Tell me how to live and I’ll be dangerous. If I find out for myself I’ll die of boredom afterwards. When I look along the valley and then up it seems as if the sky is coming into land. The mountains look as tall as if they are about to walk over me. If they want to, let them. I shall not be afraid.

  The wind is fresh except when it blows smoke into my face. I build a fire by the hut, boil water on it for tea. The wind is increasing, and I don’t like the look of the weather.

  The hut is sheltered, and when I came to it I found as if by instinct a key just under the roof. There’s nothing inside, but the floor is clean, and I have my hammock as well as food. When it is dark it seems as if the wind has been moaning and prowling for days, plying its claws into every interstice of the nerves. I wanted to get out and go after it, climb the escarpment above the treeline with a knife between my teeth, and fight on the high plateau in the light of the moon, corner that diabolic wind and stab it to death, tip his carcass over the nearest cliff.

  I cannot mimic either Jack Frost or a windkiller. It’s too dark, pit-shadows surround me, but there’s no fear because outside in the mountains the whole fresh world stretches, waiting for children like me to get up in the morning, to go out into it and be born again.

  I have finished with mimicking. I always thought the time would come, but could never imagine when or where. I cannot get into anyone any more and mimic them. I am too far into myself at last, for better or worse, good or bad, till death do me part.

  One man will go down into the daylight. In loneliness and darkness I am one man: a spark shot out of the blackest pitch of night and found its way to my centre.

  A crowd of phantoms followed me up, and I collected them together in this black-aired hut, tamed them and tied them down, dogs, moths, mothers, and wives. Having arrived at the cliff-face of the present there’s little else to say. When my store of food is finished I’ll descend the mountainside and go back to the inn, where I’ll think some more as I sit drinking coffee by the window, watching the snow or sunshine. I’ll meet again the tall, blonde, rawboned, blue-eyed woman who fed half her meal to the cat – before setting off on my travels. Don’t ask me where, or who with.

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  The Camberwell Beauty

  August’s? On the Bath Road? Twice-Five August – of course I knew August: ivory man. And the woman who lived with him – her name was Price. She’s dead. He went out of business years ago. He’s probably dead too. I was in the trade only three or four years but I soon knew every antique dealer in the South of England. I used to go to all the sales. Name another. Naseley of Close Place? Jades, Asiatics, never touched India; Alsop of Ramsey? Ephemera. Marbright, High Street, Boxley? Georgian silver. Fox? Are you referring to Fox of Denton or Fox of Camden – William Morris, art nouveau – or the Fox Brothers in the Portobello Road, the eldest stuttered? They had an uncle in Brighton who went mad looking for old Waterford. Hindmith? No, he was just a copier. Ah now, Pliny! He was a very different cup of tea: Caughley ware. (Coalport took it over in 1821.) I am speaking of specialities; furniture is the bread and butter of the trade. It keeps a man going while his mind is on his speciality and within that speciality there is one object he broods on from one year to the next, most of his life; the thing a man would commit murder to get his hands on if he had the nerve, but I have never heard of a dealer who had; theft perhaps. A stagnant lot. But if he does get hold of that thing he will never let it go or certainly not to a customer – dealers only really like dealing among themselves – but every other dealer in the trade knows he’s got it. So they sit in their shops reading the catalogues and watching one another. Fox broods on something Alsop has. Alsop has his eye on Pliny and Pliny puts a hand to one of his big red ears when he hears the name of August. At the heart of the trade is lust but a lust that is a dream paralysed by itself. So paralysed that the only release, the only hope, as everyone knows, is disaster; a bankruptcy, a divorce, a court case, a burglary, trouble with the police, a death. Perhaps then the grip on some piece of treasure will weaken and fall into the watcher’s hands and even if it goes elsewhere he will go on dreaming about it.

  What was it that Pliny, Gentleman Pliny, wanted of a man like August who was not much better than a country junk dealer? When I opened up in London I thought it was a particular Staffordshire figure, but Pliny was far above that. These figures fetch very little though one or two are hard to find: The Burning of Cranmer, for example. Very few were made; it never sold and the firm dropped it. I was young and eager and one day when a collector, a scholarly man, as dry as a stick, came to my shop and told me he had a complete collection except for this piece, I said in my innocent way: ‘You’ve come to the right man. I’m fairly certain I can get it for you – at a price.’ This was a lie; but I was astonished to see the old man look at me with contempt, then light up like a fire and when he left, look back furtively at me; he had betrayed his lust.r />
  You rarely see an antique shop standing on its own. There are usually three or four together watching one another: I asked the advice of the man next door who ran a small boatyard on the canal in his spare time and he said, ‘Try Pliny down the Green: he knows everyone.’ I went ‘over the water’, to Pliny; he was closed but I did find him at last in a sale-room. Pliny was marking his catalogue and waiting for the next lot to come up and he said to me in a scornful way, slapping a young man down, ‘August’s got it.’ I saw him wink at the man next to him as I left.

  I had bought myself a fast red car that annoyed the older dealers and I drove down the other side of Newbury on the Bath Road. August’s was one of four little shops opposite the Lion Hotel on the main road at the end of the town where the country begins and there I got my first lesson. The place was closed. I went across to the bar of the hotel and August was there, a fat man of sixty in wide trousers and a drip to his nose who was paying for drinks from a bunch of dirty notes in his jacket pocket and dropping them on the floor. He was drunk and very offended when I picked a couple up and gave them to him. He’d just come back from Newbury races. I humoured him but he kept rolling about and turning his back to me half the time and so I blurted out:

  ‘I’ve just been over at the shop. You’ve got some Staffordshire I hear.’

  He stood still and looked me up and down and the beer swelled in him.

  ‘Who may you be?’ he said with all the pomposity of drink. I told him. I said right out, ‘Staffordshire. Cranmer’s Burning.’ His face went dead and the colour of liver.

  ‘So is London,’ he said and turned away to the bar.

  ‘I’m told you might have it. I’ve got a collector,’ I said.

  ‘Give this lad a glass of water,’ said August to the barmaid. ‘He’s on fire.’

  There is nothing more to say about the evening or the many other visits I made to August except that it has a moral to it and that I had to help August over to his shop where an enormous woman much taller than he in a black dress and a little girl of fourteen or so were at the door waiting for him. The girl looked frightened and ran a few yards from the door as August and his woman collided belly to belly.